Other Voices

by Colin Greenland

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

In the royal palace of conquered Luscany, Princess Nette chafes at the bonds that confine her to a life of empty ceremony. Meanwhile, in a less salubrious quarter, Serin Guille's father scents success in his search for the secret of immortality. Then a gypsy blade flashes at the ice fair. An imperial emissary lies bleeding by the frozen river, and the uneasy peace is shattered. The Eschalan overlords will not rest until they have revenge. Serin saw it happen, saw the blow fall. Now she can never go home . . .

Release date: May 27, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 185

Sample

Arethusa Guille, whom everyone called Serin, was the daughter of Dr Tarven Guille, the taxidermist. Her first home was a small dark room on Montesin Alley. Serin’s mother, Amber Marchan, had formerly been a great beauty, a montano, desperately shy in the pursuit, but on more intimate acquaintance fierce and demanding. Dr Tarven Guille was not a doctor, but had been a medical student when they met, doing his military service in the borderlands. It had been as a consequence of their affair that Tarven had left college without a licence, driven into apprenticeship to support his new wife.

Their firstborn, Tomasina, had never opened her eyes. A second, Sybilla Kay, ‘was long in the coming and quick in the going’, as Amber would say. The bowel cough had her before she was two. Serin knew about her sisters, but that she was not allowed to play with them.

She had got her name Serin while she was quite a little baby. Her mother, having dozed as she often did in the afternoon, came to and thought there was a bird in the room. It was Arethusa, sitting up in her cradle. She had spontaneously discovered how to whistle. She turned to her mother and gurgled, then lifted her arms and whistled more, frowning with the effort.

Amber snatched her up crowing. Lost for any other way to express her pleasure, she flung open the window. It had just stopped raining. The alley was full of cold, damp air. Snails were about. A blackbird settled briefly on the wall. The baby whistled; the bird flew off.

‘You’re too little to be a blackbird!’ Amber told her daughter. She thought of the tiny yellow singing bird she had seen; on the peregrinage, far south, never here. ‘Are you a serin? Is that it?’

Her one child was the whole joy of Amber Guille’s disappointed life. She was never happy in Calcionne, even once the old man died and the Guilles came to live above the shop, among all its unsold treasures. Fox snarled by beaver; pied cat gazed impassively past bent-necked goose. They were Serin’s first companions, after her mother. She would clamber on to the little shelf above the stairs and crouch in an enclave of stiff feathers, tarnished scales and dusty fur. She stared into the baffled eyes and felt their minds, dim, feral, accusatory.

‘Have I not told you to come down from there?’ her mother would want to know.

The child never took any notice. On the shelf she sat so still she was in no danger of falling; so her mother would leave her there, for hours on end.

Favoured customers would be invited upstairs for a cup of beer. They would exclaim at Serin and her ‘pets’.

‘Do they all have names?’ they would ask her.

‘Yes, of course,’ she would say.

Then the more persistent ones would ask, ‘What are they?’

‘I’m not going to tell you,’ said Serin.

Indeed she herself did not know what the animals’ names were. She knew they had them, but they were secret. She also knew that this was not something grown-ups would understand.

For a while Amber Guille went around polishing everything. Imagine, she, whose parents had been hill people, having her own house in the city! But its gloom conspired with her fatigue. As the years went by, with no sign of an end to the war, she would grow listless and sit by the hearth, staring rapt at nothing visible. Then she would rouse herself, shriek at the fire and send Serin out for coal.

It was always one basketful, never more. The girl could carry that, to save the charge for delivery. Serin hated doing it, hated the weight of it, but she liked to be out of the house alone. She had no one to play with. At school, where she went infrequently, the boys made up stories about her dealings with dead animals. The girls passed comments in an undertone, and sucked knowingly at the ends of their hair. Serin wanted to shout at them but was tongue-tied. She would gaze at the book, pretending not to hear.

Serin had not inherited her mother’s arch good looks. At nine she was sallow and skinny, her hair an unparticular shade of brown. Her best dress was yellow, with a bodice, but today she was wearing one of the plain ones, which was green and faded and did not suit her. Her boots were brown. Her breath steamed in the darkening air.

She had to wait at the coal-yard while the dame served an old man who trailed a small, hairy dog at the end of a rope.

‘I’m not complaining,’ he kept saying. ‘Why should I complain?’

The dog stared at Serin. Then it nosed at something smeared on the cobbles. Serin pictured the dog as it would be dead, and stuffed. She liked the idea, and wondered how she might steal it, and kill it. Not that she would have attempted such a theft, not at nine, but she enjoyed thinking about it. The things she had stolen so far had been small ones, things easily overlooked, a hand-lens, a lace scarf from the back of a cupboard.

The old man left at last, with the dog after, and Serin stepped forward. The dame looked up from under her broad hat.

‘Good evening, Serin. How’s your mother?’

‘She’s quite well,’ said Serin. She put the basket on the trestle.

‘What’s she doing today?’

‘She’s sitting looking in the hearth.’

The coal-dame grunted and picked up a shovel. ‘And you say she’s well.’

‘She is. She smiles sometimes.’

Coal-dust had drifted to the corners of the yard, like black snow.

‘Did she give you money?’

Serin handed over the coins and dragged the basket to her.

‘And for the last time?’

Serin stared, saying nothing.

The dame sighed, and folded her arms. She looked over Serin’s head. ‘Next week will do,’ she said, bitterly.

Bracing herself against the weight of the basket, Serin walked stiffly out of the yard and down the hill. The mountains were tinted pink and lilac in the last of the watery light. They looked insubstantial, as though some fanciful hand had painted them on the sky to make up for the bleak streets and grey-faced houses.

At the far end of the alley behind the Bunch of Chives she saw Marta, Pig Rosse and Otto Meringer. They were looking furtively round the corner, hiding from someone. Serin approached cautiously, uncertain of the reception she might get; but Marta saw her and beckoned.

Serin set down the basket and joined them.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s an orange man,’ said Marta.

None of them had ever seen an orange man before. He was walking along the deserted Brinkway as bold as you please, in a most peculiar coat that seemed to be all folds, and leather leggings. His hair stood up at the front in a bush, and when he came under a lamp Serin could see that it went on growing all the way down his neck, like the mane of a pony. He had large rings of black metal stuck through his ears and pieces of it clipped here and there all over him. Wound over his head and under his chin he wore a white scarf, like a bandage for the toothache.

His skin was, for want of a better word, orange.

‘Is it a man?’ asked Serin.

‘It’s an Eschalan,’ said Otto Meringer. ‘Don’t you know nothing?’

Serin believed him. It was Eschalans the soldiers were fighting. They had been fighting since before she was born. Otto Meringer’s big sister had been a soldier, now she was dead.

‘Is that an Eschalan? What’s he doing here?’

Otto picked up a stone. Pig Rosse copied eagerly, though Marta tugged his hand.

‘He’ll be wishing he wasn’t in a minute,’ said Otto, and threw the stone.

It went wide, startling the Eschalan. He gazed about.

‘People of Luscany,’ he cried in a strange, squeaky voice. ‘Lay down your arms! Welcome your new lords!’ He did not seem to have any weapons himself. He waved a short stick, with a piece of cloth tied to it.

Pig Rosse threw his stone. It went no distance, but the noise attracted the man’s attention. He came towards them.

‘Run!’ gasped Marta, pulling Pig with her. But Otto stepped out into the street and flung another stone. It hit the man on the forehead. He clutched his head.

Otto and Serin went nearer.

Between his fingers the Eschalan’s blood was ordinary red.

‘People of Luscany!’ he shouted at them. ‘Lay down your arms!’

‘He can’t even talk proper,’ said Otto. ‘Hark at him.’

They pelted the Eschalan with refuse from the gutter. They chased him down the alley and into the backyard of the Bunch of Chives.

‘Welcome your new lords!’ he besought them, waggling his stick. Otto and Serin had him at bay. Marta and Pig Rosse were still hanging around, watching from a safe distance. For a moment it seemed there were no grown-ups anywhere in the whole world; then the back door of the inn crashed open and Mad Polly the potwoman came out with a tub of slops.

Mad Polly too had been a soldier once. One of her arms was missing below the elbow, and there was a great scar where someone had cut her face in two and the two pieces had never fitted back together properly. Perhaps it had also sundered her wits. They were all afraid of her, even Otto and the older ones.

Polly took one look at the Eschalan and hurled her tub at him. Then she disappeared back inside, only to emerge again at once clutching the meat-knife.

‘People of Luscany lay down your arms!’ he piped.

‘Let me have him!’ she howled.

The madwoman’s hand was huge, and so was the knife. Ranting she lurched past them so close Serin could feel the spray of her spittle. Her blade waved wildly.

The Eschalan gave a desperate cry and flourished his stick. It caught the woman on the wrist. She staggered aside, her hobnails striking sparks from the flagstones, but did not drop the knife. He tried to back off, almost fell over the tub, and thrust his stick at her head.

‘Tripe and chitterlings!’ whooped the potwoman.

‘She’s mad!’ shrieked Marta, thrilled.

‘They’re both mad,’ said Serin.

‘They’ll kill each other,’ pronounced Otto.

The children began to scatter; all but Serin, who was fascinated. There was blood on the Eschalan’s scarf. His ear-rings shook. He grimaced as he kicked at the potwoman’s shin. Serin caught a glimpse of crooked, rotting teeth.

Polly dodged the kick. ‘A pound of tripe and a pound of chitterlings!’ she hooted. ‘Hot off the bone!’

The Eschalan was remarkably nimble now he had room to move. Mad Polly carved the air.

They closed, stick locked with knife.

‘Give ’im a ’aircut, Poll!’ yelled Otto from the alley.

‘Orange juice! Orange juice!’ jeered Marta and Pig Rosse.

Faces watched from the scullery window. There were urgent shouts in the street, a whistle blown.

Serin was enthralled. The fight swayed towards her again. The meat-knife twisted this way and that. The man whined and panted, shoving at Polly’s forearm with his stick.

‘Serin?’ shouted someone inside the inn.

Serin took a step closer.

Then there were running feet in the alley. The constables arrived, barging past the children at the gate. They grabbed the combatants, dragging them apart. Serin ducked, watching Polly aim a last chop at the man’s neck as they overwhelmed her. She saw her jab the stump of her arm in a constable’s throat; then, as the Eschalan tried to parry, saw the blade bounce off his stick and slice away his left ear as neatly as a wing of chicken.

Blood spouted black in the gloom. It splashed Serin in the eye as hands grabbed her under the armpits from behind. Alarmed, she jerked forward, throwing herself down among the jostling legs. But the hands were large and forceful and they had her still, and hoisted her clear.

‘Serin, you little cat, come out of it!’

It was her Uncle Banner. He held her in a firm embrace of fur.

As they turned from the mêlée towards the stables, Serin wiped her face on his shoulder. He smelt of beer, and trees. She craned back for a last sight of the excitement. Mad Polly was being marched off. The constables were having trouble dissuading other patrons of the Bunch of Chives from attacking the battered orange man, who even now still cried:

‘People of Luscany lay down your arms welcome your new lords!’

Then Serin was being wrapped in fur and set before Uncle Banner on his horse, to be jolted briskly into the shadows, away from the gathering crowd, and down the hill towards home.

‘Uncle, why –’

‘Hush.’

He caressed her head.

As they turned into Threadpole Street, all at once he asked, ‘What did you want to do, uh? Get yourself a pretty wound?’

Serin didn’t answer. Then, thinking of the woman from the inn and the seam across her face, she said: ‘Mad Polly’s not pretty.’

‘She is not,’ he agreed. ‘You want to be a soldier? No, no.’

They went in the back way, leaving the horse in the yard licking stolidly at the damp cobbles.

Serin’s mother came out of the kitchen and shrieked at the stains of blood on her daughter’s dress. Her brother smiled broadly, and patted her on the shoulder cheerfully enough; but she flung herself at him and hugged him no less fiercely than if her child had been killed indeed.

‘It’s nothing,’ he kept saying, in montano. ‘Sh, it’s nothing. She’s not hurt.’

‘There was an orange man, ma.’

‘Where have you been?’

‘At the Bunch of Chives.’

‘What were you doing at the Bunch of Chives?’

‘Watching the man.’

‘What man, what are you talking about, what is this man?’

‘It was an Eschalan, ma.’

Serin’s mother gasped. ‘Primary protect us.’

Her brother put his arm around her shoulders. She stiffened suddenly.

‘Where is the coal?’

‘In the alley,’ said Serin. ‘At the Bunch of Chives.’

‘And what good will it do there?’ demanded her mother, seizing Serin and driving her upstairs, to confront her with the grey remnants in the grate.

Serin looked at the worms of fire blinking and wriggling among the embers.

‘I’ll fetch it in the morning.’

‘Stupid girl, don’t you know someone will take it by then?’ cried Amber Guille indignantly. ‘Some beggar, some old drunk?’ she added, as though the social status of the imagined thief made a difference to her loss. She shook her errant daughter by the arm, then wrapped her own arms about her and broke into sobbing.

‘The Eschalans! They will kill us all!’

A moment later she sniffed heavily, then gestured at Serin’s smock. ‘What is this blood?’

‘They had a fight, ma. Him and Mad Polly. I’m all right,’ said Serin, trying to placate her.

But Amber couldn’t take it in. ‘The Eschalans come,’ she moaned. ‘We are dead. We are all dead.’ She clung to her impassive daughter.

At times like this, when her mother was wild and unreasonable, Serin would withdraw into infancy, ceasing to care or make any effort. Nothing ever did any good anyway. From the cupboards and the shelves the sad old beasts called to her.

As soon as she could she disencumbered herself from her mother’s embrace and climbed on to the shelf above the stairs. She was too big now to get right in between the cases, into their cave, but it made a good place to crouch while she took carefully out of her pocket what she had been clutching inside it all the way home.

Downstairs she heard Uncle Banner go into her father’s workshop.

‘Banner. What is all this noise?’

‘Good afternoon, Tarven. I’ve brought Serin home. It’s nothing. She got herself a little – dirty.’

‘Dirty? Please explain.’

‘A little blood. It’s nothing.’

‘Blood? Is she injured?’

‘No, no.’

‘Then what is all the noise about?’

‘Some people were fighting. Serin was splashed with blood.’

‘Where was this? I had no idea she was out.’

‘At the inn. The Bunch of Chives.’

Serin sat motionless on the shelf as her father came snorting up the stairs. He stopped to glare at her, but shouted to her mother.

‘Can’t you even look after her properly? Must I do everything for you?’

Amber came rapidly to the head of the stairs and shouted at him, ‘She lost the coal-basket and all the coal!’ as though Serin were not there, within arm’s reach, all the time.

‘What have you been doing?’ her father demanded.

‘There was a fight,’ she said again. ‘Uncle Banner brought me home.’

‘And what happened to the coal?’

Mute, Serin looked to Uncle Banner, lingering sullenly at the foot of the stairs.

‘I didn’t see it,’ he said. ‘I never heard of it.’ A flicker of impatience crossed his face. ‘I’ll go and find it.’

‘Don’t bother, Banner,’ said his brother-in-law, bitterly. ‘We’ll manage.’ He turned again on his wife. ‘Don’t just stand there. Take her and clean her up. Give her some work to do. If you won’t I will.’

Amber’s bosom was heaving. In a soft and passionate vibrato she appealed to her husband.

‘Be kind to me now, Tarven. We must not quarrel. We have so little time.’

Leaning on the banister she took his hand and pressed it to her lips.

He turned his face away, retrieved his hand, and started downstairs.

‘Nervous hysteria,’ he said, to no one in particular. ‘That’s all it is.’

‘Tarven,’ said Banner, claiming him and walking him back towards the workshop door, ‘one of them was an Eschalan.’

Tarven stopped.

‘An Eschalan?’

‘Orange as a carrot.’

‘Are you sure?’

Banner scowled. Tarven returned to the stairs, to confront his daughter. His wife had gone to lie down.

‘Is this true?’

She nodded, once.

‘What was he doing?’

She shrugged.

Her father made an exasperated noise with his tongue, and went back down the hall, Banner following. ‘An Eschalan? How on earth did he get there?’

‘He was saying, Luscans, surrender,’ said Banner.

‘Who was it he attacked?’

‘The cracked woman.’

‘Mad Poll? Why her?’ He exhaled, explosively. ‘Why do I ask? Why does an Eschalan do anything? Vicious creatures. I tell you, Banner, I should like to have the dissecting of one of their crania. When I was in the army –’

Serin had no intention of listening to her father talk about himself. Fortunately, neither did her uncle. What he said by way of interruption made her attend.

‘Tarven. Listen. What if it was an announcement? Maybe they are ready to invade.’

‘Invade? Twelve years they’ve harried us. They’ve never got past Carphale. If they couldn’t in ’98, they never will now. Not with the new guns this Brylander’s making.’

Banner had not heard anything about new guns. He was eager to learn. Dr Guille told him all he had heard about the new guns that would dispel once and for all the threat of invasion by Eschaly.

Serin pressed her nose against. . .