Curl felt a moment’s relief that she didn’t have to work the streets any more. She wasn’t proud of how easily she had taken to this profession of hers, nor how popular she was amongst the roving clientele of the area. Still, in only a few months of working she’d been able to gain a steady number of reliable customers, enough so that now she could take appointments in her room, and charge all the more for doing so.
She recalled that she was entertaining that evening, that old letch Bostani, with his stench of tarweed and ale and stale sweat, and his pig eyes that seemed dead to everything, even to pleasure. Curl made it a habit to never think of these things in her own time. She retreated back to the bed and placed the open box on her lap once more, and stared down at it unblinking.
The grey dust was something else she was hardly proud of. She’d taken to the stuff much too easily as well, finding in it something that could get her through the long days and the even longer, lonely nights. A dross-addicted prostitute, she thought to herself. Her aunt and sisters would be distraught to see what had become of her. And her mother, her ally…
Curl looked away from the box of dross with a sudden glimmer in her eyes.
Why had she even come to Bar-Khos, she wondered? The city-port of Al-Khos had been closer to the northern refugee camp than to here. Yet some compulsion had led her to tramp and hitch rides all the way to the south of the island barefoot and alone, often only escaping trouble by luck or the kindness of strangers.
Curl didn’t know why, but some part of her had needed to come to Bar-Khos and the legendary Shield; this city of eternal siege where they had stood and held firm against the forces of Mann, and where they were still doing so, even now, while an imperial army massed on the eastern coast intent on their conquest.
She’d come to like these Khosians and their ways. At first, she’d been distrustful of the aid they had given her party of refugees, freshly arrived in their boat from Lagos. In short time, though, Curl had realized that this generosity of spirit was an honoured trait amongst these people, and humility too, for all their contradictions of pride and hardiness.
As a people, their moods seemed prone to melancholy, though they were romantics too, so that even their soldiers could be poets and lovers as easily as drunks and suicides. They relished their freedoms yet favoured cooperation and community. They prioritized families and simple, peaceful lives above all else. Those of wealth and power, like their own Michine nobles, were often spoken of with a kind of bitter sympathy, as if the painted men and women of influence were ill of spirit, warped by their own desires to lord it over others.
Speaking with other refugees living in the area, those who had travelled the Mercian Isles and knew them well, Curl had heard how it was the same with all the peoples of the Free Ports – if not even more so – where people lived with no nobles at all. She still found the notion a hard one to grasp.
Curl glanced back to the dross in her lap. At breakfast, one of the lodgers had said that the imperial invaders were from the Sixth Army. The same men who had laid waste to Lagos.
Curl thought of a town on fire, a pale sky obscured by smoke. Her family’s cries lost amongst the tumult of so many others. The tears spilled down her cheeks. For long moments she sat there, shaking and awash with heartache, a wet hand covering her burning face.
When a sob finally forced its way from her chest she sat up straight and shook her head in self- admonishment. She sniffed, and brushed a hand across her cheek as though to swipe away a cobweb.
She looked up at her little shrine to Oreos, a decision somehow made within her.
‘Shit,’ Curl said.
The interior of the Stadium of Arms was larger than she’d imagined from its outer facade of pillars and curving stonework.
As she stood in its main entranceway, pressed against the side to stay clear of the soldiers rushing past in both directions, she looked on a scene of barely contained chaos. Men in their hundreds occupied the sandy floor of the amphitheatre, where every Fool’s Day the zel races were held, and every other day it was used for the training of recruits.
She saw Red Guards and Specials, Greyjackets and Free Volunteers. Many of the older men were dressed in civilian clothing. Some men even wore dirty rags, and were having manacles removed from their ankles. Amongst them all, soldiers ran back and forth humping loads of equipment, which they were piling into mounds scattered across the sand. There seemed no order to it. Yet men bawled commands as though they knew the lie of this land.
Curl pressed even closer to the stonework as a company of Red Guards began to march by in rank and file, some of the men jeering and whistling at her as they stamped past, even though she wore the plain boy’s clothes she had been wearing on her arrival to the city. She ducked her head and hurried past, fleeing into the wide arcade that ran beneath the tiers of seating overhead.
A zel was rearing beneath the arches as men tried to hitch a cart to it. Its hooves clattered on the flagging. Blacksmiths hammered away at swords or spearheads; soldiers brushed past without a second glance, or cursed her out of the way. Curl felt her blood beginning to rise at the confusion of it all. She stopped a young man with a quick smile, and asked where she might find the recruiting office.
He thought she was joking at first, but she scowled until he relented. ‘On the right,’ he said with his glance darting all over her body and a hand flapping vaguely. ‘Through the doorway there. Then take the second on your left.’
When Curl followed his directions through a bustling passageway she found herself standing in a latrine. A row of armoured men were lined against the trough talking and pissing. In an instant a dozen faces were calling out to her in the close confines of the stinking room, while they tried to pierce her eardrums with their whistles. She ignored the flashes they gave her; instead she raised a single eyebrow, and left with a tirade of curses tumbling from her lips.
Curl was hot and flustered by the time she finally found herself at the door to the recruitment office, a room that turned out to be busiest she had yet seen. She slipped past a man hurrying through the doorway and made her way into the centre of the room, where a heavy desk stood piled with papers, and behind it sat a man who by all appearances was in the midst of a heart attack. His face was redder than any Curl had ever seen before. The sweat flowed off him in ribbons.
‘I don’t care!’ he was shouting to a nervous man hovering by his side, his voice hoarse and strangled. ‘If they can march then they go!’
‘But their gear is weather damaged,’ the nervous man told him. ‘All of it.’
‘I don’t care! Just do what you need to get them moving!’
Curl waited for him to take a breath before approaching. ‘Excuse me,’ she tried, then bent over the desk to be heard better, placing her hands carefully so as not to disturb the papers there, or the stylus and the jar of ink. ‘Excuse me,’ she said even louder.
The officer turned his rounded eyes on her. She watched them trace a figure of eight. ‘What is it now?’ he growled. ‘You want to kiss a sweetheart goodbye?’
On the desk, her hands screwed themselves into small, tight fists. ‘I’m here to enlist,’ she told him.
The man opened his mouth and kept it that way. Around him, the silence spread outwards until the room was wholly quiet and every man was looking at her.
‘Go home, girl,’ he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘We haven’t need for any more camp whores, believe me.’
Curl seized the inkwell in her hand without thinking. She flung it at the man and watched it bounce off his forehead even as she realized what she had done.
‘You little bitch!’ he screeched as he clutched his forehead in shock. She found herself picking up the jar for the stylus too, and swinging her arm back to finish the job.
But then a hand gripped her own from behind, and the jar was plucked from her grasp.
She spun around in a hot temper, looking up as she did so. A man towered there in black leather armour, heavily scarred about the face and neck.
‘Bad girl,’ he said from behind his thick beard. ‘You almost took the man’s eye out.’
‘I was trying to,’ she said in a pant.
He laughed, and then the men around him were chuckling too.
‘You’re serious, about wishing to enlist?’
‘This is the recruitment office, isn’t it?’
The man looked at the officer behind the desk, then studied Curl for a moment.
