Naomi Kritzer Dead Rivers 03 Freedom's Sisters

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I felt for handholds was there any way to scramble up? No.
Even if I learned how to fly, it s locked. There s no way out.
There s always a way out. There was a way out of the mine.
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Freedom sSisters
This place is darker than the mine.
I d heard stories about prisoners being thrown down into pits and left to die
of thirst or starvation. I spent a long time, that first day of darkness,
wondering if they would let me die here. I remembered the thirst of my trip
across the desert, with Tamar, when we journeyed to the Alashi.
It would not be a pleasant death. At least it s not hot here, but I don t
imagine that would make the thirst feel any more pleasant.
I swallowed hard, my throat clenching just thinking about it.
Or perhaps I wouldn t live long enough to die of thirst. Would the air go bad?
The djinn at the bottom of the mine had been there to bring in fresh air;
there was no djinn here. Perhaps my throat clenched because I was starting to
suffocate& But when I sat still, I could feel a breeze waft across my knees,
and when I felt through the dark I
found some holes in the wall near the floor. I didn t know where the air was
coming from, but there did seem to be air coming in.
After a time it was hard to know how long I heard a rattle above, and the
trapdoor opened, just a bit. A bucket came down on a rope. It held a piece of
bread and a waterskin. The water had a strange taste, and I was still hungry
even after I ate the bread, but at least it looked like they planned on
feeding me. They lowered another bucket and someone shouted down for me to use
it for my wastes. So I wouldn t be left to lie in my filth, either.
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I lay down a bit later on the stone floor.
Tamar, I thought, but the blackness claimed me, and I dreamed of nothing. No
borderland. No Tamar.
I
t was very difficult to guess how much time was passing. I thought they were
feeding me twice a day, but some days I thought they fed me three times and
other days only once. I tried counting times I slept, but I knew that
sometimes I napped in the middle of the day, and in any case I had no way to
mark a count. This bothered me, and I spent a long time on my hands and knees,
searching for tiny pebbles that I could pile up to mark the days. I
gathered a small heap, and since I d slept five times by then, I put five
beside the bucket I squatted over to relieve myself. I added pebbles for
several days, then reached for the pile one morning and found it scattered and
lost I
had kicked it while not paying attention, or maybe in my sleep. I let out a
stream of foul words. Would the guards above hear me and wonder what I was so
angry about?
Were there any guards up there when they weren t feeding me?
I tried again to count, then gave up. It had been about two weeks, I thought,
but it might have been half that. Or twice that. I didn t know.
O
ne time, instead of food, a ladder unrolled, and two guards descended with a
lamp. As I shaded my eyes against the dazzling light, a blow to my stomach
caught me by surprise. A lash cut across my back, tearing through the linen
dress. They asked no questions, and by the time I wanted to offer information
anything
to
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Freedom sSisters stop the beating, I couldn t get the words out.
Then it was over, and they were gone, until the next time. My stomach lurched
when the trapdoor opened again a few hours later, but it was just my dinner. I
had little appetite today, but I was thirsty; I drank the water and curled up
on the floor. Sleep came easily, despite the fear and the pain, but I couldn t
find the borderland
nothing beyond thick darkness.
E
ven in the darkness, the fever burned in my blood. I paced around and around
the tiny circular shaft, pretending that somehow this was taking me closer to
Tamar.
How many steps would take me back to where I belong?
Sometimes the fever told me that I was going to die here. Months might pass;
years. I might go completely mad alone in the darkness, until I died an old
woman, forgotten even by Tamar. Other days hope seized me with a violence that
made me sob. I would escape; there was a way out of here. Prometheus had been
bound to the side of a mountain, his immortal liver torn out daily, until
Arachne had found him and they had freed each other.
Spiders liked darkness.
Arachne is here; her messengers are close at hand.
I thought I could hear them, when the fever burned strongly enough. Or the
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djinni.
The djinni will help me. I am the gate.
Their gate. A djinn could get me out of here. If I wait. If I hold on.
Prometheus had been freed, but there was also Zeus. The story said that
Alexander had imprisoned him under a mountain when he conquered Olympus.
Though some believed that anyone who found Zeus and freed him would be granted
immortality in gratitude, in nearly a thousand years he had not been found.
I am not going to live that long.
Then I woke one morning and felt the darkness settling in around me like a
blanket of snow, and knew that the hope I d felt had only been the fever that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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