The Dark Citadel (The Green Woman) (12 page)

They filled
the
cramped room: Deborah, Persephone with her parents and brother Aengus, old
Lugh and his blind wife Frigga, Fiachra and Ceres from across the way with
their small children.

“I don’t think we should wait,” Persephone’s mother
was saying. “We should disappear now, in the night, before it’s too late.”

“But what about the others,” Fiachra objected, “the
ones who stay behind? If half the Danann workers don’t turn up for work, the
Black Boys will turn the quarter over searching for them. Who knows what they’ll
do to the people they find, the sick babies, or the families with too many
children in Overworld.”

“Fiachra’s right.” His wife Ceres sighed. “It’s
going to be difficult, but we have to stick together. We’re forewarned this
time. We just have to be all eyes and ears. If we post guards like we did at
the time of the Quarantine—”

“Fat lot of good that did us,” Persephone’s mother
muttered.

 
“They
say the Green Woman is moving. Perhaps this is what she’s been waiting for. We
must stay, hold firm, until she comes. If the Elders suspect, if too many of us
disappear, if they look too hard…” Fiachra’s voice trailed off.

Persephone finished his thought. “They’ll discover
our secret entrances to Underworld, and they’ll murder us all.”

Eyes slid anxiously in Deborah’s direction then
away again, not wanting to cause offence. She noticed the sidelong glances and
remembered the look on the face of the guard who checked her papers. She
decided she owed them an explanation. She had never experienced such a thing—all
these individuals speaking earnestly of collective security and self-sacrifice,
as though the notion of every man for himself was unthinkable. She realised
that notion was unthinkable to the Ignorants, and for the first time in her
life Deborah felt just a little humbled.

She told them part of her story, cautiously, not
wanting to trust anybody, not entirely anyway. She described how her father was
still in prison but her mother, some kind of rebel, was free somewhere Outside.
Deborah had inherited her mother’s gift for rubbing the authorities up the
wrong way and was herself in danger and had to get out of Providence. She also
hinted her mother needed her help.

“She needs help rebellin’?” Aengus asked with a
false air of innocence. He had not taken to Persephone’s new friend, with her
airs and graces and her assumption that the entire Danann people would take
time off from being massacred to help her. “You just got your rebellin’
diploma, or somethin’?”

His mother clipped him sharply round the ear. “You
mind your manners, Gus. Deborah needs our help ’cos she has nowhere else to go.
Don’t you go making her feel small.”

Aengus blushed slightly, but not as much as
Deborah, who had not thought of her position in those terms before. She
couldn’t even answer Aengus’s question; she had no idea what help she could
give her mother. But all the faces were turned towards her, waiting to hear
what she had to say.

“It’s possible,” she said finally in a quiet voice,
“that my mother and your Green Woman are one and the same person.” A hush fell
on the gathering, and perplexed looks flitted from one to another. “Father said
she’s the keeper of the Memory. He said I’ve inherited some of it too.”

Deborah looked at each face in turn, at the
expressions of hope and confusion she saw there. No one trusted her, she
thought bitterly, not even the Ignorants who had nothing to lose. In the
silence, she found herself studying the people around her as she had rarely
done before. She noticed how Fiachra and Ceres clutched their children tighter,
how Frigga’s blind eyes filled with tears as she fumbled for Lugh’s hand. Old
Lugh returned Deborah’s inquisitive stare with one of longing that made her
feel suddenly ashamed.

“We’d like to believe you,” he said with a tired
smile, “really we would.”

“So why won’t you?” Deborah’s reply shot out, too
quickly.

“We want to, child.” The blind, old lady’s voice
was warm, soothing. “There’s nothing we’d like more than to believe the Queen
is among us at last and you are the daughter she left behind in Providence.”

“Sorry,” Deborah muttered, blushing at her
rudeness.

“It’s not that we don’t think you’re sincere,”
Persephone put in hastily. “We’re just afraid you might be…mistaken.”

“And those kind of mistakes could be fatal for
people like us,” her mother added. “I don’t know about the Green Woman
returning. Yes, of course I’ve heard the rumours, but all I’ve seen are the
wraiths who peer in through the crystal with their hellish eyes, the demons who
creep over the Hemisphere at night with their rustling and their scratching,
the guard patrols armed to the teeth, and,” her voice dropped to barely a
whisper, “I’ve seen him.”

The others nodded, and Deborah felt cold.

“The demon king,” Fiachra agreed, “no longer a
serpent, but dog-like, thin as famine, and his eyes burn like the fires of
Gehenna!”

“You see, dear,” Frigga turned her blind face in
Deborah’s direction, “the Protector has made a pact with Abaddon, the
Destroyer. And the first people he wants destroyed are the Green Woman’s
allies.”

Deborah looked at the earnest faces, not
understanding.

“Us,” Fiachra said.

“Then you have to get out of here, escape!” Deborah
shouted. The others cast down their eyes and shot sideways glances at one
another.

“That’s what we keep telling them, isn’t it, Ma?”
Persephone said excitedly. “Surely now is the time to test whether the—”

“Quiet!” Fiachra’s voice was tense. “We have no
right to put the lives of the whole community in danger by gossiping like
this.”

Deborah caught Persephone darting her a sheepish
glance and wondered what she was not going to be allowed to know.

“Lugh, let me see her.” Frigga held her hands out
before her, and Lugh beckoned to Deborah to move closer. She bent her head with
a puzzled frown and let Frigga run her hands over her face, the touch of her fingers
dry and papery as dead leaves. When the old lady was satisfied she spoke. “We
have a place to hide, child, and we suspect there is a way out of the city.”

“Then show it to me,” Deborah blurted out. “When I
find my mother I can help her do…whatever she’s doing and…and…then you will all
be free!”

Frigga shook her head sadly. “To do that we would
have to show you Underworld. If ever you betrayed our trust, we would all die.
I believe you are what you say, but I can’t decide for everyone else—too
much is at stake.”

“So who can decide?” Deborah looked around the
room, her eyes lingering on Fiachra.

“The Council,” he said. “I’ll call a meeting, and
as soon as we can get everybody together—”

“But I have to get out now,” Deborah interrupted,
fear gaining ground on her impatience. “Who knows what…things the Protector
will send after me. You don’t have to show me your Underworld, just the door.
You told my father about it,” she added reproachfully.

“There is no door, child. Not even Raphael, the
husband of the woman who has the Memory—”

“My father!”

Frigga sighed. “All right, your father. Not even he
knows all the secrets of Underworld.”

“Then if your secret way out isn’t a door, there
has to be another way,” Deborah said emphatically. “Father said so.” Admiration
for the solidarity of these desperate people had been growing on her, and
compassion for what was in store for them. But she had her own problems.
Deborah turned to old Lugh.

“Do any of the old stories mention a door?”

* * * *

The Yellow Rock rose sheer above the shifting desert sands. Pitted with
black holes like a hundred eyes, the rock faced Providence defiantly. Deep in
the holes, in the darkness at the centre of the rock, the demons hung, wrapped
tight in their leathery wings, eyes tightly closed against even the memory of
the light, waiting. They hung in leather-bound silence, waiting for the dark,
waiting for the screaming of the sandwraiths to veil the Hemisphere in burning
sand, waiting for the signal to soar out into the sand-filled darkness and pick
up the trace of the girl.

Dusk fell. Brown
air thickened.
Grey buildings cast uncertain shadows. Streetlights flickered here and there,
but between the pools of light lay deeper shadow. Silence grew, filling the
spaces between words and swallowing the last ringing echo of footsteps. No rain
fell in Providence to bounce and splash off loose guttering. No wind gusted
down streets rattling loose shutters, no laughter rang out, no cars roared, no
music poured from open windows. Silence hung like a pall over the city, grew
out of the shadows and spread like the dark, like fear.

This was the Holy City State of Providence,
never-changing, crepuscular—not life, though not quite death. But the
nameless fear was creeping closer, the silence growing more like the hush that
falls before the final breath. A subtle change was occurring, and even the most
pious, the most law-abiding, the most worthy of the Goodwives and Goodmen felt
its stirrings.

In the silence and the fear, the streetlights
guttered and died. The Ignorant tenement blocks and the solid townhouses of the
élite alike were plunged into darkness. For a few seconds real silence gripped
the city as the background hum and vibration of the life support system, its
extractors and purifiers, oxygen producers and refuse recyclers all cut out.
Then guards’ whistles and the sound of running, booted feet filled the thick
air, followed by voices shouting, “To the temples! The divine breath is
stilled!”

Hector and his father, the public executioner, joined
the compact stream of citizens moving steadily towards the centre of town and
the great temples. Only the hot, sweating faces and the heavy labouring of
their breathing betrayed the crowd’s intense fear. Father and son filed into
the temple with the other men then fought against the current that tried to
carry them deep into the body of the building and push them up against the
altar rails.

Odin preferred to be at the back, to keep an eye on
the worshippers. Hector, his slight frame jostled from side to side, hung onto
his father’s sleeve as Odin pushed his way to the side out of the crush.
Annoyed, men turned to berate the uncouth lout pushing away from the altar.
They saw who he was with, and the insult never left their lips. Instead faces
paled, and the crowd parted to let the executioner pass.

Hector hated crowds. He hated the way, however
densely packed the people were, he and his father always seemed to find
themselves in the centre of an empty, lonely space as if they had some terrible
disease. He raised his eyes to the tiered balconies and tried to pierce the
wooden screens that hid the women. He knew his father was watching him out of
the corner of his eye, knew what he was thinking. But he was wrong. Hector had
little interest in ogling the young women; he was searching hopelessly for a
small, tired-looking woman with puffy, sleepless eyes, and a bruised face.

Odin nudged him and leered. “If this wasn’t a holy
place, I’d have that screen down and give them hot bitches what for, wouldn’ I,
son? Eh? An’ wouldn’ you too?”

Hector, his slow thoughts still on his mother, gave
his father a horrified look. “Ah, leave off, Da. It
is
a temple though, innit?”

His father shrugged. “An’ they’re still hot
bitches.”

Hector’s uneven eyes narrowed. How he hated his
father sometimes! He would never find his mother’s face among the women hiding
behind the temple screens. The last time he had seen her face was in the
morgue, blue with bruises, a black swelling beneath her left eye.

Odin had taken his six-year-old son to see his
mother. In the morgue. He hadn’t told the child she was dead. Hector wondered
what his mother was doing in a drawer. She was set upon by a band of
bloodthirsty Ignorants, his father told the officials. Hector looked at her
face and didn’t understand. The marks were the ones she had when he last saw
her, in the morning before he went to school. Her face often looked like that.
As a child Hector knew he was supposed to admire his father, but he had never
been able to like him. From that day Hector’s dislike of his father was tinged
with hatred.
  

The temple filled. As the Elders filed in, their
faces hidden behind golden masks, the pushing and shoving stopped. The
stiff-robed priests called upon the Wise God to forgive the sins of His
children, to keep the desert demons at bay, and bestow His soothing breath upon
them once more. For either His children had sinned, or there were sinners in
the midst of the faithful.

The children of the Wise God harboured sinners,
they knew that, but it was a necessary evil: without the labour of the sinners
the Ark of Providence would founder. Something had angered the Wise God and He
had turned His face from His children. Instead of His life-giving breath, it
was the burning demon breath of the desert void that filled the Hemisphere. The
Elders prayed for guidance to extirpate the evil in their midst and deflect the
wrath of the Wise God.

The Elders muttered their prayers; men pressed
their faces to the ground. The sound of wailing, muffled by thick veils, fell
from the galleries while the air thickened like soup and the oxygen began to
rarefy. The thickest part of the throng folded over a fallen body—someone
had fainted. Children’s crying was stifled, older people rasped and wheezed.
Hector stretched his scrawny neck and gasped for air, but only the burning
emptiness of the desert filled his lungs. Time was marked by the pounding beats
of frantic hearts. The atmosphere was as hot and motionless as the inside of an
oven.

Hector shuffled closer to his father and sank to
his knees, his pale face sticky with sweat, his wiry red hair dark and damp.
His head swam, and he strained to hear the panting of the demons he feared were
clustered round the darkened Hemisphere. He imagined the darkness palpitating
with unholy life creeping through the shadowy, unlit streets and moaned in
terror as he felt the clammy touch of approaching death.

“Da? Is it nearly over?”
 
he croaked. “It’s suffocating in here. I can’t breathe!”

Odin cleared his dry throat and shrugged. “Could be
hours. She could kill us all. It’s her fault, you know. Your bleedin’
betrothed.”

“How?” Hector asked, his head spinning, unable to
work out the connection.

“She’s got out, ain’t she? Gone to find her bitch
of a mother, ain’t she? Defyin’ the Wise God, ain’t she? It’s them two green
bitches doing this, mark my words.”

When the sense of his father’s words sunk in,
Hector’s jaw dropped. His nose was running but he hadn’t the energy to wipe it.
He thought of his betrothed, the girl he had been ordered to find and bring
back to face her punishment. He hadn’t imagined this though, that she was
capable of such blasphemy.

He studied his father out of the corner of his eye.
Odin wheezed and groaned, his mouth hanging open, sweat trickling down his
thick neck. Too stupid to lie, Hector thought, and his unsettling eyes narrowed
in anger. He’d sort her out, the little whore. Running away from her rightful
betrothed and upsetting the Wise God! He’d sort her out, just wait and see if
he didn’t.

The sound of wailing floated down from the
galleries, to be stopped abruptly as a mother clapped her hand across the
baby’s mouth to prevent the crying drawing evil down upon them. Hector knew
many babies would never cry again after this evening, and he sneered to himself
at the stupidity of women.

There was a sharp hiss of indrawn breath from the
people before the altar. Hector saw the crowd surge forward and caught sight of
one of the Elders staggering and falling, a gold mask slipping from his slack
fingers. Two Sons of the Word, two Pure Ones caught him, their movements fluid
and machine-like in their long black coats and boots. They removed the stricken
Elder with military efficiency, but not before the horrified worshippers had
glimpsed the pale, sweating face of an old man. Men glanced at one another
through lowered lashes before pressing their faces into the dust of the floor,
murmuring frantic prayers for the preservation of their souls and muttering
revenge on the blasphemers who had drawn down the fury of the Wise God.

After six hours of litanies and breathless
incantations, the lights flickered once, twice, then grew in strength. The
people gasped in relief as burning lungs filled once again, and they struggled
back up off their knees with hallelujahs of praise for the mercy of the Wise
God. Odin was already elbowing his way to the doors, but Hector hung back to
count the prostrate bodies that didn’t rise, to listen for the shocked gasps of
the mothers who had inadvertently smothered their babies. Hector felt lucky,
blessed by fortune, and hoped the dead were some of those who had looked the
other way when he or his father passed by.

In the street outside, the dead were carried in
silence to the morgue. The crowd that poured homeward was not silent. Voices
were already raised against those responsible for provoking the Wise God’s
anger. The crowd called for vengeance on the usual scapegoats, the traitorous
Ignorants. No Ignorant had ever asphyxiated in the temples, they shouted.
Hector didn’t care that no Ignorant was allowed to set foot in a temple because
his prayers would be impure and blasphemous. Hector joined in the chanting,
eager to belong to the group, relieved to still be alive, rejoicing in the
prospect of violence.

Hector had a mission, and that he had been spared
seemed to bode well for its success. The principal of his betrothed’s school
had entrusted him, crooked Hector, with a secret mission. He stuck out his
narrow chest with pride and his eyes glittered. He would show them what he was
made of. Nobody would call him Spider Boy again.

* * * *

Demons settled thickly on the crystal surface of the Hemisphere, clustering
where the streetlights were fewest and the dusk deepest. Avidly, they drank in
the unthinking hatred that boiled and churned in the animated streets. Peering
down between the shabby buildings, lidless eyes picked out two figures on the
edge of the waste ground that separated the Ignorant tenements from the
Hemisphere. The two figures moved hesitantly, picking their way round unseen
obstacles, searching for something.

Demon eyes found her. She was coming! The wordless
scream ran across the Hemisphere, chilling the blood of the Ignorants who
heard. She was coming! Dark shapes settled with spread wings over the crystal.
Scales scraped, claws scratched, clutching at the smooth, resistant surface.
They did not know how she would pass to the other side, but they knew that she
would try. Then Hell would be unleashed to pick up her tracks.