New Decameron Forty-Five: Kate Elliott (Patreon)

The Task She Had Been Given (a Spiritwalker universe story) by Kate Elliott

In the besieged city of Lutetia, so the wits said, people might suffer from lack of meat, but at least they always had coffee, wine, and bread. Nevertheless, in the classroom where the older girls spent every afternoon packing musket balls, gunpowder, and a fuse into brass cartridges, the sound every pupil waited for was the dinner bell and the most cherished topic of conversation was food.

“I hear they’re serving rat today.”

“I hear rat tastes like chicken.”

“As if you remember what chicken tastes like!”

Ciandra did not look up even though the speakers sat at the same table. She was engaged in the delicate task of positioning the fuse so it would burn for the proper amount of time during the cartridge’s flight from the cannon’s mouth and only explode when over the enemy camp. If it exploded too early, it would be no use whatsoever in harming the enemy and might even spread its havoc over the beleaguered inhabitants of Lutetia. It had to be just right. That’s what her father had explained when he’d set the older girls to this task four weeks ago. Now, of course, her father was dead.

Every time she positioned a fuse in a cartridge among the lead balls, she thought of her father, of his encouraging smile, of the way he kissed her forehead when he checked in on her at nightfall, of his kindness toward the orphaned. She thought of the time he had yelled at the Minister of Works when the minister had refused to give refuge to the families of the workers. He had forced the minister to allow the families to set up housekeeping in the cellars. But when she thought of standing graveside in the little ornamental park that now served as cemetery for this district, rage did not boil in her heart. Mostly she just felt empty. She worked because that was the task she had been given, she and the other girls whose nerves had not broken under the strain.

Somewhere in the distance a trumpet blatted, sounding an alarm on the barricades, but not one girl winced or even paused, just kept up their chatter..

“I for one don’t believe there is a rat left uneaten in this city. I hear there are no dogs or cats, either.”

“That’s just disgusting, Aurea! As if anyone would eat dogs or cats.”

“Dogs and cats are the least of it! Haven’t you heard the rumors that down in the Thirteenth District they’ve started eating the dead?”

The other girls just laughed, for it was an old, tired joke. The walls shook, windows rattling, and some of the girls glanced up at the thuds of cannon balls landing within a few blocks. Was that the splintering crash of timber and glass shattered by a direct hit?

The dinner bell rang.

All interest in the cannonade vanished. At once the girls set down whatever they were working on, returning a handful of lead balls to the big bowl, capping flasks of dry powder, setting pliers on the heavy worktables on which they had once dutifully written out their schoolwork on slate tablets. The slate tablets had long since gone to patch holes punched into roofs by artillery fire, and no one had time for schoolwork any way. The classroom cleared, leaving Ciandra alone at a table. She sealed off one last brass cartridge. There could never be enough. These projectiles, the invention of her mother’s fertile mind, were one of the few ways the starving, stubborn defenders of Lutetia had left to hold off the enemy. If the enemy won, then what good would her father’s death have done?

“Cee?” Aurea stood in the doorway, beckoning. “If you don’t hurry, you might get nothing to eat.”

Ciandra stared at the cold sheath of metal resting on the table, and for a moment she could not remember how the cartridge had come to be there.

“Cee! I’m famished! And you’re too thin to forget to eat!”

Ciandra shook herself. She nestled the heavy cartridge into a quilt-lined coffin, sized for a child, in which other finished cartridges rested, ready to fly. After wiping powder off her fingers with a rag and smoothing down her rumpled skirts, she followed Aurea down the dim corridor to the stairs. No one dared spare oil to light lamps on a cloudy November afternoon, but she had lived in this building for five years, since she was eleven, and she could have walked it blindfolded without mishap.

Aurea took her hand companionably as they caught up to the line of girls cautiously entering a dark stairwell; its windows had been boarded up four months ago after a near miss had shattered all the glass. The smell of urine tainted the closed-in space, for in the early days of the siege more than one child had cowered here and voided themselves out of simple, stark fear during the pounding of enemy guns. Ciandra adjusted her breathing effortlessly to lessen the smell by taking shallow breaths.

Aurea whispered. “My uncle told me this morning all the girls are being lifted out by balloon.”

The words roused her numb heart. “All the girls in Lutetia? There can’t be that many balloons.”

“No, just us girls here, in the Ministry of Works.”

“That seems terribly unfair, for us to go while others are forced to stay and suffer.”

“It’s all very well to think so, but don’t you suppose people, especially rich and well connected people, have been sneaking their children, or even themselves, out of the city when they can? Anyway, it was the bargain the Minister of Works made with the workers. That their children would be lifted out in exchange for them working without pay.”

“That was for children, anyone under the age of fourteen. But it wasn’t fair anyway, for so many young children remain in Lutetia who have no such chance to leave.”

“And not even rats to eat for their dinner,” said Aurea, starting down the stairs with the brisk pace of someone who has climbed and descended in darkness many times. “Unless they’re very very quick. Cee, the workers admired and loved your father, because he promised to take care of them.”

“Because he was one of them. He rose from the ranks.”

“Yes, and he never forgot that. Not even after he married your mother. Taking care of the workers includes taking care of their families. We’re here because he forced the Minister to take us in. You know that.”

“Yes,” she whispered, “I know that.”

Aurea squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry about the ones who can’t leave Lutetia. But I’m not going to stay just because they have to. Are you?”

“I’ll obey my mother.” 

Walking at the tail end of the line of girls, they reached the ground floor and filed under an arch magnificently carved with mysterious faces peeping from behind elaborate screens of leaves. The spacious dining hall was adorned with a fantastical and famous mural depicting the ancient bearded Hellenic philosophers measuring the universe while, beside them, the Roman engineers built aqueducts and theaters and the excellent roads that linked the many principalities, dukedoms, and city states of Europa. It was a bit hard to see its busy details, even thought it was still daylight, because only half the large windows still had glass, the rest being boarded over.

Still, Ciandra always smiled at the pigs tucked into the bottom left corner. The mural had been painted thirty years ago when the building had been erected to be the home of the newly established Conservatory of Arts and Metrics. Only after the war had started and the original home of the Ministry of Works was blown up by a saboteur had the Conservatory been refitted to a new purpose. So had they all. Every inhabitant of the city of Lutetia had been refitted to fight the Iberian Monster and his unstoppable army.

The girls filed to stand by their assigned benches. As Ciandra halted beside Aurea, she realized she smelled no food, not even the acrid scent of the weak coffee they drank every evening. The girls began to whisper in the gloom. Was it to be stale bread and vinegar wine for their meal? Were they to starve, too, as they had heard people were doing in the poorer districts of the city, the ones where it was rumored the population had resorted to cannibalism?

A clap of hurried footfalls echoed from the corridor. All fell silent in perfect obedience as Captain Bettier strode into the room with four legionnaires following like hungry dogs at his heels. With his bare left hand on his sword hilt and the gloved right holding a folded piece of parchment singed to a crumbling brown, he surveyed the eighteen girls.

Aurea sighed softly, as a girl might when dreaming of a dashing soldier whose heroism and good looks are beyond dispute. Ciandra snorted under her breath and rolled her eyes.

The captain heard her, for his gaze settled on her for a pause far too long for comfort. He was a distinguished man in his mid thirties, wounded more times than anyone could count. That he was missing part of his right ear and had a pronounced scar on his chin did not diminish his attractive features. But Ciandra did not like his measuring gaze nor the way his lips pinched as he frowned and then, clearing his throat, looked away from her to address the waiting girls.

“There are three balloons,” he said. “You will descend to your cots and collect a single change of clothing and necessaries for your person. If you bring more than one valise, I will personally choose which one to throw off the side of the tower. Each pair of you must take charge of one of the invalids and bring them up with you to the east tower. You will care for them on this perilous journey. By dusk, you will all be embarked and on your way out of the city. Go immediately.”

He looked once more at Ciandra. She stiffened her shoulders and met his gaze, for she would not be intimidated, but he did nothing more than raise his eyebrows as if to query her stare, then strode out as briskly as he had come in. The four soldiers remained. A trumpet blared far away. A rattle of rifle fire popped, and ceased as abruptly.

“I told you so!” Aurea whispered triumphantly. She grabbed Ciandra’s hand and dragged her to the still open doors. “I for one can’t wait to get out of this cursed city!”

The other girls followed in a reckless flow down the corridor and to the stone steps that led into the dank reaches of the cellars. This time of day no lamps burned. The invalids rested in darkness except at dawn and dusk, when the healthy girls rose and made ready or returned and lay down to sleep. The rank smell of the slops buckets made Cee’s eyes water. Light glimmered behind, and the line of girls huddled along the vault as two of the soldiers hurried up with lanterns.

“You’re to be quick, mamzelles,” said the younger of the two, a fresh faced young man who winked at Aurea as if they had met before, but Ciandra was sure she had never seen him until this moment.

His companion was old, gray-haired, and as sour of feature as fermented juice. “Get on, and no flirting,” he snapped.

They had lived under siege for so long that they had grown accustomed to managing tasks swiftly, for you never knew when you might have to drop everything and sprint for cover. Ciandra always kept her change of clothing neatly folded and her two precious possessions folded between the fabric of her spare petticoat. It was easy enough to bundle them up with comb, soap, menstrual cloths, pins, a handkerchief, and a few other necessaries.

Aurea stood at the cot beside Ciandra’s, lifting one skirt and then a second; she had more clothes than the other girls. “Cee, which do I choose?” 

“Let me do it. You’re shaking.”

“How do you stay so calm? Diana protect us! What if we get shot down?”

Cee considered the season and the skirts and began bundling up the practical wool rather than the fashionable silk. “If the decision is made, there’s no use second guessing it, is there? Go help poor Genevieve. It’s not her fault she’s got the bronchitis. She can barely walk.”

Aurea had the knack of helping others more than herself. With the young legionnaire’s admiring eye on her still plump figure and pretty, round face, she got the eight invalids up and assigned each to a pair of girls. Genevieve had to be carried between two of the stronger girls for she was too weak to get up the stairs on her own. As the group trudged upward, Cee paused at the base of the stairs, a valise in each hand, to wonder if her friend would survive the night. Poor Genevieve, with her golden hair lank and greasy for lack of wash water and her siren’s golden voice choked by wheezes and racking coughs.

She waited until the other girls had started up, for it took some coaxing and prodding to get the four girls who were not ill but broken in spirit to venture up the dark stairs. Once robust Arda had to be manipulated like a puppet, companions moving her arms and legs. 

The old soldier stepped up to gesture toward the stairs. “Frightened, miss?” he asked, and Cee supposed the words were meant kindly.

“No, Messire. I am not frightened.”

“Are you not?”

She considered the matter, as if taking inventory of a closet filled with carefully folded linens and neatly stowed tools. Her breathing and pulse were steady, her skin neither hot nor clammy. Her thoughts she had long since schooled into an even flow that did not lurch or speed. She just did things the way well-tended gears and clocks did things.

“Tick tick tick,” she muttered.

The man looked at her, his forehead creased and pale eyebrows drawn down, as if he was not sure whether to be worried or pitying.

“Best we go up,” she added. “You have the lamp.”

****************************************

"Oh I want more, I want to know where they go in the balloon," Maya says. 

"No food," he says, gloomily.

"Oh you're obsessed with food. I'm not even hungry, we just had those waffles. But did you notice, girls filling shells, like in Amber Lough's Open Fire, remember?"

He looks interested. "It must have been a real world historical thing, though I've never run across it before."

Maya nods. "That was so interesting, but I want more! Is that coming soon?"

"Unfortunately not, she needs to finish it," he says.

"Then I hope she gets on with it so I can read it. Meanwhile, I think I'll re-read the Spiritwalker books as soon as this is over." The brindled cat, his fur and whiskers restored to their pristine shades of brown and black, jumps up on her lap and curls himself up.

"Good plan," he says. "And for now, how about a short story by Derryl Murphy, author of Napier's Bones?"

Maya reaches to take it, doing her best to avoid unsettling the cat. And they read.