At once she faltered in her tracks.
‘It’s all right,’ he said again, taking her carefully by the arm. ‘Come now, we need to be gone from here.’
He led her down to a cove and a small beach of shingle. A fishing boat bobbed in the water. Men and women were wading through the waves to climb aboard.
The man led her out into the water. Curl convulsed from the bitter shock of it against her thighs.
‘One more!’ he hollered to someone already on board, and a few heads turned to acknowledge her. She saw men and women with reddened eyes, hair askew, faces sagging. No one spoke as they helped her into the boat. Curl found a space amongst the bundles of goods and sat down and huddled with her knees pulled up to her chest.
‘Is that everyone?’ asked the man.
‘Aye, skipper,’ replied another. ‘Now let’s bloody well get away from here while we still can.’
Two men pulled on oars, slowly dragging the boat out through the waves of the cove into the breakers beyond. The sail was unfurled, snapping as it caught the offshore wind. After a time they were shooting across the choppy water, with all eyes turned to the distant island behind.
‘That fool Lucian and his rebels,’ spat a small bald man, glancing about him with a set of black eyes. ‘He brought it down on all of us, and damn his soul for it. Damn your soul, I say! ’ he bellowed, shaking his fist at the land.
The rest of the group sat in silence. They continued to gaze upon their homeland as it faded into the distance.
The old skipper shouted a command. At the rudder, a young lad turned the boat so that the sun wheeled behind them.
The bald man calmed himself by steady degrees, his muttering diminishing until he was silent. He sobbed for a while, the other men looking away in embarrassment. One by one the women began to cry too, though Curl only stared over the side of the boat, still numb.
‘You’re a lucky girl to stumble across us like that,’ said the bald man, his eyes dry now as he shifted across to sit beside her. Curl inched away from his touch. ‘Perhaps your ally there was looking out for you, hey?’ And he chuckled drily to himself in mockery.
‘Leave the girl alone,’ snapped the old skipper. The man scowled, but he let her be.
Curl heard the women beside her talking amongst themselves.
‘Where are we going?’ asked the youngest.
‘The Free Ports,’ replied the oldest. ‘They are free, still. And they are not so hostile to refugees as Zanzahar.’
Refugees. Curl tried the word against her tongue. So that was what she was now. She thought it was a small word for all that it meant.
Curl looked back at the island of Lagos, a mere smudge on the horizon now. In her hand she clutched the piece of wood that was her ally, rubbing it with her thumb as the lean wind cut through her body, piercing her to the heart.
‘Enough of that, now. I don’t want the children hearing you.’ Rosa spoke in an exaggerated hush, and bustled to the kitchen door to close it before she returned to folding the children’s clothing on the table.
‘What?’ exclaimed Curl, sitting across from her and watching the woman work. Exasperated, she glanced through the open window at some of the half-wild urchins in the backyard, where they were enacting street robberies for play.
Rosa’s movements were stiff and angry. The table rocked whenever the woman leaned any weight on it, so that its legs clattered against the wooden floor and transmitted the urgency of her frustrations. They were alone together. Breakfast had been served long ago, shortly after dawn, and the assorted lodgers had eaten their small portions of gruel with the sound of the guns on the nearby Lansway fuelling their talk of invasion and war. Even now, across the room, the main dining table squatted in silent accusation at Curl. She eyed it with distaste, the filthy oil-cloth that was never removed from it, not even when eating, the debris of used bowls and platters and cutlery of the lodgers. It was Curl’s turn this morning to clean up after them all. Try as she might, she couldn’t rouse herself to start it.
‘I’m only telling you what I’ve heard,’ she said.
‘Well, whether we know of these things or not, it won’t make a bit of difference to what’s happening. We’ll know it soon enough if those monsters come tearing over the walls for us. Until then, please, give it a rest. Let us live in some peace while we still can.’
Curl plucked at a loose thread on her linen blouse and held her tongue. It wasn’t easy, though, when her blood was still humming from the tail-end of her high, and her mouth wanted nothing more than to flap away in idle chatter.
‘I’ve half a mind to go and volunteer myself.’
A roar of laughter burst from the woman. ‘Oh Curl, you do make me laugh!’
Curl found her face flushing red. ‘What? I don’t mean to fight. But they need people for other things. Cooks and… such.’
Rosa stopped laughing and threw a folded nightshirt into the basket on the floor. She picked up the last of the freshly washed nightshirts, her breathing loud. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you today, my girl. You’d better not go saying anything like that to the children. I’ll clip you one, I truly will. You’ll have the poor things heartbroken with all your talk.’
The door to the kitchen burst open and Misha and Neese came running in. ‘ Out, out! ’ shouted Rosa. ‘You’re trailing dirt all over the place!’ But the girls were brave enough to ignore her for a moment, and they stopped before Curl, and opened their mouths and widened their eyes in feigned surprise, and let out a chorus of screams at the sight of her prominent hair.
‘ Out! ’ shouted Rosa as they ran back outside again, hollering all the way.
‘Very funny, girls,’ Curl shouted after them.
Pea was standing in the doorway, her nose running and a thumb held in her mouth. She was new to the house, and still hadn’t learned to take Rosa’s barks for what they were.
The girl was holding a hand to her small belly. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said.
‘You’ll just have to wait,’ Rosa told her. ‘Now run along, little one.’
As the girl wandered away, Rosa sighed and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. She stood there framed in the light of the window with her other hand on her hip, looking out at the children in the yard with tender consternation in her eyes.
It softened Curl too to see her like that. She had grown deeply fond of this woman in her time here.
Curl knew she had been blessed all those months ago when she had first arrived in the city of Bar-Khos, and had spotted the sign on the door and knocked upon it in search of lodging. She’d stood there wearing hand-me- downs donated by the volunteers from the refugee camp, feeling lost in a city of this size, lacking the faintest idea of how she was going to support herself; and then the door had suddenly tugged open, and Rosa stood before her with her tired, kind eyes.
Now, like her night terrors come real, the Mannians were coming to destroy her world once again.
‘It’s just…’ she ventured. ‘I need to feel like I’m doing something.’
Rosa turned her head, observed her for a moment with sympathy.
‘You could do something useful for me right now, my girl.’
‘Oh?’
Her head gestured to the table of dirty platters, a sly humour in her expression.
Curl clapped her hands to her cheeks and blew an exasperated breath of air.
The shutters of the window lay open, so that over the grumble of the guns Curl could hear the faint sounds of shouted orders, and the dim beat of marching feet in great numbers. She was sitting on her bed with the small box on her lap, the dross half-unwrapped on its open lid. The sounds outside, though, caused her to set them aside and cross to the window.
There was nothing to see, save for the houses opposite, and a handcart being pushed along the street by an old rag man, some children running past him in silence. No street girls in sight anywhere, she saw. Most likely they were out along the Avenue of Lies, snatching what quick business they could from the troops filtering out of the city towards the marshalling grounds beyond the northern walls.
