Cozy Like That
The infirmary was right under the outer wall, and Lill remembered how to find his way from there to the paved path at the centre of the stronghold. This time he encountered no goats. Everything was still, silent except for birds crying overhead.
The three houses on the side of the path that Lill had come from were all roofless husks.
Looking through the doorway of one, he saw that the interior had been converted into a luxurious sty housing a family of pigs.
The ducks might have been kept exclusively for eggs, the goats for milk and hair for spinning, but the only reason to keep pigs that Lill knew of was for meat. He would have to tell Halza.
The houses on the other side of the path were intact, with slate-shingled roofs, two with doors, the third with a curtain covering the doorway.
Lill remembered he’d seen someone—or thought he’d seen someone—in that doorway before.
Had he imagined the man, or had he been real?
If he was real … Lill ran down the list of people in the stronghold, as given to him by Khatu.
He wasn’t Khatu’s younger brother or his father—he’d looked in his thirties.
He wasn’t the henchman, Tirtu, whom Lill had already met.
If he was real, the man who looked like a warrior angel, with his scarred face and gold hair, was Vanu Urártu.
Lill looked at the doorway with the curtain. That man had ducked when he came through it. He had to be over six feet tall. Again Lill found himself wondering: did Arsha know this?
If that was Vanu Urártu, how was Lill supposed to go about killing him, even if he had weapons?
Lill stood staring at the doorway on the other side of the path, as if that gold-haired man—Vanu—might emerge from it again at any moment.
He didn’t, and neither did anyone else. The curtain swayed in the breeze and then was still.
Shaking himself out of his reverie, Lill followed the paved path to his left, to a place where it intersected with another path.
Here he judged he was roughly in the middle of the round fortress.
To his left, the path led from the crossroads to the blocked-up gate, which he was seeing from the inside for the first time.
In the other direction lay the half-ruined great house that must have belonged to the lord of Umtúshta.
The lord and his family were still here; did they live in there, in the half of the building that still had a roof?
Or had they moved out into one of the more intact but much smaller dwellings in the village?
Lill followed the path to the paved yard that fronted the lord’s house.
There was a well here, with a well-head of yellow-grey stone and a pulley.
On one side of the yard were three fruit trees in full bloom and a cat sleeping in the shade.
Several small outbuildings and a bread oven stood on the edges of the yard.
Lill walked under the trees, past the cat, and between a shed and a pile of firewood next to the bread oven.
He stopped and looked at the firewood. Where did that come from?
Three years after the gate had been blocked up, how did they have a pile of split logs—not broken-up furniture or bits of ruined houses but neat chunks of chopped-down tree—stacked as high as the roof of the bread oven?
Maybe there had been more trees in here, and they had cut one of them down? Maybe they just hadn’t been baking much bread.
He walked around the back of a house whose roof looked recently thatched, and whose shutters were closed.
As he passed the window he heard distinct noises from inside: someone grunting as if with effort, repeatedly, as if …
No, it was two people, there were surely two different voices.
Lill backed silently away, a hand to his mouth, as if he needed to stifle his breath to avoid detection.
He had never, to his knowledge, heard the sound of two people fucking together, but he had a few times heard a boy in the dormitory making half-stifled noises as he used his own hand shamefully.
Lill had never done such a thing himself.
But whatever the people in that house were doing, it had the same urgent rhythm.
He remembered wondering in the darkness of the dormitory whether the boy in the next bed was enjoying what he was doing, because it was hard to tell from the sound.
He wondered the same about the people behind the shutters.
Their noises sounded almost anguished. He remembered—he hadn’t thought of it in years—what had happened to that boy, after he had been caught.
He turned and fled back past the bread oven and the cat, through the quiet yard and down the path toward the infirmary.
Vanu whistled to himself as he draped wet clothing on the hedge to dry.
He missed music, if he was honest. He’d never say so to the girls, and he wouldn’t have tried to bring music into the house when they couldn’t enjoy it with him.
But sometimes the silence of their days here left him yearning for noise.
He looked across the yard at Atari pulling weeds out of her garden. She had been so pleased with the harvest she had produced last year, entirely through her own efforts. It warmed his heart in a way he couldn’t quite put into words, even in his own head, to see her so proud of something.
Susami came around from the back of the girls’ house with a basket full of wet garments.
“More?” he said. “But there’s no more room to hang them.”
She rolled her eyes at him and shoved the basket into his arms so she could sign back: “That is because you’re not hanging them properly.”
She began smartly rearranging the garments he’d already hung out, somehow finding room for all the clothes she had brought. He laughed shamefacedly.
“Da, Da!” Mikhi shouted, running out of the house. “I tried the cheese and it turned out great!”
Their lives revolved around these things now: taking care of their houses and possessions, getting the daily necessities of water, fuel, and food. Especially food. For the girls, it wasn’t so different from their former life, he guessed, but for him it was like living in another world.
“Come with me,” he said to Mikhi, on impulse. “Let’s go talk to Tirtu.”
“About what?” Susami gave him a sharp look.
Maybe she was still worried about the business with the boy bride.
He didn’t know how much Mikhi had told her—for that matter, he didn’t know how much Mikhi herself had heard or understood, and she hadn’t asked him about it.
He would need to talk to them both—to all three of them—but he needed to know what he planned to do about it before he could explain it to his daughters.
“I think we should have another dinner, all together—it’s been too long. What do you think?”
“Lovely,” said Susami, smiling and obviously relieved. “I like that idea.”
“Yes!” Mikhi cheered.
“Tell Atari, will you?” said Vanu. He beckoned to Mikhi. “Let’s go find Tirtu.”
Dinner was brought to the infirmary that night by a girl Lill had not seen before.
She was young, fourteen or fifteen, reed-thin but rosy-cheeked and winsome, and though she wore big gold rings in her ears, she dressed in the same black coat and loose trousers as the men and wore her flaxen hair pulled back in a messy knot.
She even carried a sheathed knife, poking out of her sash.
“We’re all eating in the gathering place tonight,” she announced as she put down a tray laden with food. “But Na Gurti said you should not stir from here yet, either of you.”
She spoke loudly—a little more so than necessary—and there was a softness and flatness to her pronunciation that was familiar to Lill.
She was hard of hearing, he guessed. He must make sure to speak clearly and directly in her line of sight when he replied—except, he remembered in time, he couldn’t reply, because she was speaking in her native language, which he was pretending not to understand.
He had almost made a basic mistake, an amateur mistake. He cursed himself inwardly.
Outwardly, he nodded and smiled and said, “Thank you, miss,” in Zashian.
“I made the cheese,” the girl informed him proudly, pointing out a dish of soft white cheese flecked with herbs.
“It’s very good. The best I’ve ever made.
” She got to her feet. “I have to get back. Maybe next time we eat together you can come. Before we send you back over the wall. Oh yes,” she continued as if one of them had exclaimed in surprise, though of course they hadn’t, “we are going to send you back. Da doesn’t need a bride, and you—” She frowned at Halza.
“We don’t even know what you’re doing here. Enjoy your food.”
She turned smartly and trotted out of the infirmary. She was wearing wooden clogs that clomped resoundingly on the flagstones in the doorway.
“What did she say?” Halza asked when she was gone. “Do you have any idea? She looked at me—was she talking about me, I wonder?”
Lill reached for a piece of fresh-looking flatbread. “I don’t know what she said, but if I had to guess, it was probably that they’ll be sending you back over the wall when your leg heals.”
Halza blanched. “Sending me how?”
“Not throwing you. I expect they’ll get a ladder or something so you can get up to the top and then call to the troops at the guard house. Here, try this cheese. Mm, it’s tasty!”
“Who was she, do you think?”
“One of Vanu’s daughters, obviously.”
“Oh.” Halza shuddered.
“See, she didn’t look the least bit interested in eating you, did she?” Lill couldn’t resist adding.
She’d have been born at around the same time Vanu led the raid on the Tawa Valley.
Maybe men up here married young. Lill chewed his mouthful of bread and cheese, thinking about how this girl was feeding him food she had prepared, and he was planning to kill her father.
But things like this must happen all the time. It was just that he was new to it.