Chapter 16: ‎Chapter 15 — First Days ‎

‎The door slatted open before the light had decided itself.

‎“Outside. Line.”

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‎Bare feet slid from bunks. Blankets peeled. No one asked why.

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‎They filed into the yard. Stone still wet with night. Breath showed in threads. The huntress stood where the ground turned to packed grit, her face as empty as the wall behind her. To her left, the scribe woman with her slate and string. To the right, the bored nurse from the pit, arms folded. In front of them all, a bald, bearded man with shoulders like a gate and a hammer head resting on the ground like an extra weight his hand had forgotten to set down. Behind him, a red circle had been painted on the far wall—too bright, too simple.

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‎No one spoke.

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‎The red circle waited on the wall, bright against stone.

‎The bald man stood in front of it, hammer balanced on his shoulder, idly worrying at a nail with his teeth.

‎Out in the yard beyond, the three women watched. The nurse stifled a yawn, already weary of the waiting.

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‎Nothing else.

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‎They waited for the rest of the words that didn’t come. A cough tried to be a laugh and failed. Someone sniffed. The wind tugged at a loose thread on a sleeve and gave up.

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‎The hammer man watched the line the way a cliff watches weather—without hurry. He didn’t blink much. A girl near Aurora pressed her knuckles under her ribs until her breath squeaked.

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‎Silence stretched. The hammer man stayed. The red circle stayed. No one moved.

‎Then the huntress spoke, flat and final.

‎“Dismissed.”

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‎They went where the gesture sent them. Back through the barracks door. The smell of thin gruel found them first: boiled grain, no salt. Bowls waited on the long table. Spoons knocked wood. No one had much to say that wasn’t swallowing.

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‎After the bowls, basins. The water yesterday had been cold. Today it was a layer deeper and no warmer. Soap bit. Hands reddened. Rags hung from pegs, already damp. A girl with chapped lips washed the same wrist three times as if the skin there had done something wrong.

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‎The scribe returned and pointed: boys to one side, girls to the other, two small flocks shooed apart by the flat of her slate.

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‎Girls went to laundry. The yard out back had troughs set up like animal feeders, each filled with gray water and a scum the color of old copper. Crates of rags waited—cloth that had once been shirts, once bandages, once anything—now stiff with grease and whatever had dried there. The girls worked until their fingers swelled and the skin along their thumbs went slick and sore. Buckets slopped. A rope line took the weight of dripping cloth and bowed like an old man. A fly walked the lip of a tub, fell in, surfaced, decided against living.

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‎Boys went to the pens. The day carried the stink in on its back and set it down with them: piss, rot, the warm wet breath of animals that didn’t like the shape of fences. From the laundry yard, the sounds broke through in pieces—bucket over rail, a snarl cut short, straw grinding under boots. Once, something heavy struck wood and wood remembered the shape of it for a long time.

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‎By midday they met again at the table. The girls’ knuckles were white and ridged; their palms looked flayed where the soap had argued with the fat. The boys’ eyes had a shine to them that wasn’t water. One of them didn’t sit right away, as if his legs had been asked all morning to stand too near teeth. Bowls again. Spoons again. The taste didn’t change.

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‎Basins again. This time the water didn’t bite so much as cling. It kept the smell in, moved it around.

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‎Afternoon took them both, all together, to where the killing was finished and the rest continued. The place had a name the hunters used with their mouths curled in on themselves; to the children it was only the house where meat became parts and parts became nothing until they were asked to be something again. Hooks lined the rafters, swaying without wind. Floors ran in channels that had been scrubbed until stone showed pale beneath what wouldn’t leave. A man with his sleeves rolled to the shoulder lifted a length of something that had been alive and dropped it into a bin. It made a sound that was not a sound. The children were handed scrapers, pails, brooms with bristles like wire.

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‎Work did not look at them while they bent their backs. It simply occurred, and they occurred inside it. Offal slid; blood went from bright to brown; the smell grew a body and sat on their shoulders. Someone gagged once and then again and then knelt to finish being sick into his own bucket. Nobody laughed. There was only the small scrape-scrape of metal on stone and the hollow clunk of bone where it met the wood lip wrong.

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‎When that room had as little left to forgive as it could, the children were walked to another place where the city sent what it didn’t want to keep. Pits, covered and uncovered, channels that should have taken river but took this instead. Men with poles moved the surface the way you move porridge, except this porridge didn’t remember mercy. The older apprentices tied cloth hard over their noses. The youngest didn’t bother; they were past the part where a hand could help.

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‎They cleaned. They carried. A girl fainted and woke with the nurse’s pin tapping her cheek. The nurse didn’t look like she enjoyed that any more than the girl did.

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‎When evening came, it did not do anything to the smell. Food waited. They ate it. Water waited. They washed in it. The stink did not argue, because it had already won.

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‎Bunks, then. The room held bodies and the weight that rides bodies when there has been more of the day than there should be. A whisper started and didn’t find an end. Sobs were small; they were for the people who could afford them. Sleep took the ones it could and left the rest to stare. Aurora lay on her side, eyes open on the black square of the window. Somewhere in the barracks a boy’s breath hitched the same way every minute, as if his lungs expected teeth each time and were grateful to find air instead.

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‎Before light, the slat opened again.

‎“Outside. Line.”

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‎No one startled. They had kept watch for those words by not sleeping.

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‎The yard was the same yard. The huntress stood as she had. The scribe lifted her slate. The nurse looked like she had never sat down. The bald man planted himself before the red circle. Frost touched the grit in the low places and did not melt.

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‎The huntress stood as she had. The circle did not move. The hammer man planted himself before it.

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‎Again, nothing else. Again, the long minute that made itself into more minutes. One boy shifted his weight as if a thought had taken his ankle and tugged—then it let go. The hammer man’s beard lifted once in a breath and settled.

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‎The huntress didn’t move. Her voice came after the silence had finished with them.

‎“Dismissed.”

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‎Bowls. The gruel had a different thinness only because the spoon had a different angle today. Water. Soap. Hands that stung in the same place they had stung yesterday.

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‎The chores switched.

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‎Girls to the pens. The beasts were big in the smallness of the stalls, eyes showing white around the rim. Straw had turned into something that wasn’t straw anymore. A handler tossed feed and didn’t say mind the tusk because he had said it too often to other children once and found out saying didn’t stop tusks. Aurora watched where hooves found purchase, where the planks gave, where heat gathered and held. A girl hissed when a horn scored her forearm shallow, not because of the pain but because the sound of it might invite the next thing.

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‎Boys to laundry. Their hands, unused to this softness that cut in a different way, reddened quick. Water slopped over the sides and darkened their shirts to the waist. They didn’t look at the girls when the groups passed near each other; they had seen the pens and didn’t want to give the pens anything to remember.

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‎At midday, together again. Bowls. Spoons. Ears ringing with the quiet people make when words would be work. Basins. The steam had less patience.

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‎Afternoon was the same house as yesterday and somehow a worse one. The hooks looked lower. The floor’s old stains remembered where everything had been and told it to be there again. The children scraped. They carried. They rinsed. They lifted pails two hands at a time and walked careful so the slop would not decide to walk itself. The nurse moved through like a thin weather. The scribe marked lines without looking up much.

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‎After the slaughterhouse, the pits. A boy went to his knees on purpose and stayed there with his eyes closed until someone hauled him by the elbow. Another kept a song under his breath that had only two notes and neither of them was music. Aurora tied a strip of cloth over her mouth when the older ones did, not to keep the smell out—nothing could—but to belong to the shape of the moment.

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‎Evening again. Food. Water. The soap had been worn down by so many hands it looked like a bone. They washed it to nothing. The stink chose not to leave. It liked the room.

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‎Bunks. For a while, no sound at all. Then the small ones made the small noises of people whose bodies refuse to keep secrets. A girl rolled over and found she had not moved. Someone muttered the same word twice in two different voices, then stopped trying for either.

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‎The dark stayed. It wasn’t the kind that keeps you. It was the kind that sits at the edge of the bed and tells you what the morning will say.

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‎It said it.

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‎“Outside. Line.”

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‎No one moved fast. No one moved slow. They were already turned toward the door. They stood, the way people stand when the rope creaks over the beam in the next room. The breath they took was shallow and enough. The line formed without a word. The yard waited.

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‎The huntress had not changed. The circle had not moved. The hammer man’s eyes were the same color as the iron in his fist.

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‎The children stepped into the cold and did not tremble. They had done all their trembling in the hours before. The voice had only come to collect it.

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