PROLOGUE
1
ALL spring they managed to stay alive by hiding in the abandoned tannery quarter, coming out only at night to scrounge for food. After a few nights, running from the dogs, hiding in the pits, they became accustomed to the stink. Better to stink like the tanners, Matthias pointed out to his sister, than be torn to pieces by dogs.
Anna reflected silently on this. It gave her some small satisfaction to know that if they were caught by the Eika savages, if they were run down by the dogs and rent arm from shoulder, leg from hip, at least they would smell so badly of chicken dung that surely not even those hideous dogs would eat them. Or if the dogs did eat them, then maybe their flesh, immersed so many times in oak bark tannin that their skin had begun to take on a leathery cast, would poison the creatures; then, from the Chamber of Light where her spirit would reside after death in blessed peace, she could watch their writhing, agonized deaths.
All spring there was food to be scrounged, for those who had escaped the city had fled without having time to fetch anything and those who had not escaped were dead. Or so at least observation told them. Half-eaten corpses lay strewn in the streets and alleys, and many houses stank of rotted flesh. But they found stores of vegetables in root cellars and barrels of ale in the common houses. Once, they foolishly ventured to the kitchens of the mayor’s palace where they found sweetmeats that made Anna, who stuffed herself with them, violently ill. Matthias forced her to run, gagging, with a hand clapped over her mouth to keep it in and in such pain she thought her stomach was going to burst, all the way back to the tanneries so she could throw it up into the puering pits, a stew of chicken dung mixed with water that would, he prayed, hide the smell of fresh human vomit.
No dogs came ’round the tanneries for a long while after that. Perhaps the Eika had given up hunting their human prey or deemed there were none left worth hunting in the empty city. Perhaps they’d sailed down the river to hunt in greener pastures. But neither child dared climb the city walls to the parapet to see how many Eika ships lay beached along the river’s edge. Now and again they saw Eika walking those parapets, staring north toward the sea. Now and again they heard the keening and howling of the dogs and, once, the screams of a human, whether man or woman they could not tell. They kept to familiar haunts and stayed mostly in the little shed where Matthias had slept after he had been apprenticed to a currier the winter before the Eika attack. Left behind, forgotten, in the confusion of the attack and the hopeless street-by-street defense of the city, he had had the wits to take refuge with his younger sister in the foul tannery pits when he saw the dogs hunting through the city. That was why they had survived when so many others had died.
But come summer, they used up their last stores and had to dig in untended gardens for those half-grown vegetables that had fought past the weeds. They learned to hunt rats, for there were rats aplenty in the empty buildings, fat ones well fed on dessicated corpses. Anna found herself with a talent for stone throwing, too, and brought down seagulls and complacent pigeons and once a feral cat.
Come summer, more Eika came, and these Eika brought human slaves with them, gleaned from a distant harvest.
When one fine summer’s morning the Eika returned to the tanning quarter with slaves brought to work in the tannery, the two children fled to a loft and cowered behind tanned hides which had been hung to dry from the crossbeams. When they heard voices, the creak and scrape of a body climbing the ladder, Matthias boosted Anna up to one of the great beams. Her terror added strength to her tugs, and with him scrambling on the uneven plank wall and her pulling, they got him up beside her. There they huddled, clinging to the beam and shaking with fear. The stink of the tannery protected them no longer. The trapdoor opened at the far end of the loft.
Anna sucked down a sob when they heard the first whispery soft words—an Eika speaking a language they could not understand. A dog yipped and growled outside. As if in reply a human voice—below, from over by the puering pits—yelped in pain, then began screaming and pleading pointlessly and unintelligibly, screaming again until at last, mercifully, the screams cut off with a gurgle. Matthias bit his lip to keep from crying out. Anna’s eyes filled with tears that slipped down her cheeks; she grasped the wooden Circle of Unity that hung on a leather cord at her thin chest—her mother’s dying gift to her—and traced her finger around its smooth circle in silent prayer as she had seen her mother do many times, though this wordless prayer had not availed her mother against her final illness.
Footsteps shuddered on the rungs. A body scraped, half metal, half cloth, heaving itself up and over onto the loft floor. A man grunted, a human sound, curt and yet familiar in its humanity.