Hero Grown. Andy Livingstone
to the citadel had been, and was considerably less salubrious. The soldiers encased them in a shell of armour and sharp edges, with no option but to tramp along between them on a journey where time was stretched by never knowing when the end would be reached but always knowing that misery waited at that destination.
He was a slave again. He waited for despair that never came. He steeled himself to suppress an anger, futile anger, anger that never rose. He prepared to resist a wave of injustice that never washed over him. He wondered at their absence, but all he felt was relief.
He was still alive.
Right now, at this moment, he walked in captivity, but he walked feeling the ground beneath his feet and the sun on his head. He lifted his face to feel the heat, to catch the slightest breeze on his skin, to see the endless blue of the sky. Movement caught his eye and he saw Grakk looking at him in question.
‘Better a slave who breathes than a corpse who is free,’ Brann said.
‘Some would differ.’
Brann shrugged. ‘There is no freedom in death, only a certainty of no more life. Death steals the chance of change. To choose to die nobly rather than live to seize an opportunity to make things better, well…’ He shrugged. ‘I can only think that those who make such a choice would think otherwise should they consider it longer than the impetuous moment. I fear stepping from a great height in despair and finding halfway down that I wished I could fly.’
Grakk grunted. ‘You are quite the philosopher today. That is good, I was preparing my words to drag you back from despair and let you use all available time to prepare for tomorrow, but you have spared me that.’
The thought of tomorrow settled both into silence. Brann turned his face to the sky again. While I live, I will fight to live. What other way is there?
He was unable to see much of the city past the bulk of their escort, but it was clear that the more they travelled, the more the affluence melted away. The areas they began to pass through became dustier, the white of the walls was more cracked, the footing was increasingly uneven. They passed through a great old gate in the city wall, one not frequented by merchants and in fact, if the current level of activity was typical, not frequented by many people at all other than a couple of bored guards who pretended not to be close to dozing when they noticed the approach of the soldiers. They descended a wide ramp, its surface weathered and flaking in places, carved into the face of the bluff that Sagia sat upon and, a short distance after they had left the city proper, the houses started again, some with a small untended garden area, some crammed against each other, and all little more than shacks. A length of empty land had wild shrubbery, gnarled, twisted and fighting the dry ground, growing alongside the road where it was fed by the occasional use of the gutter, before they passed in front of a long wall, around the height of a man and a half as much again, its top a series of curving dips that was itself topped with railings cut to set the spiked tips at a uniform level. While dry grasses and wild plants gathered at its foot, matching the determined but sparse plant life of the scrubland that stretched into the distance opposite, the metal of the railings was well tended and the wall looked solid.
They stopped at an arched gateway midway along the wall’s length, and one of the soldiers banged on a door cut into the wood of the gate. A symbol was burnt into the smaller door, two short horizontal lines crossing close to the end of one longer vertical one, forming the simplistic shape of a sword with a flat pommel, with that symbol beside an inverted version of itself. Above it a grill was filled with the glower of a guard’s face as he checked the source of the knocking. With an unimpressed grunt, he opened the door and was passed a note. Spear points were levelled and Brann and Grakk were prompted through the doorway, where three more guards waited, all in identical red tunics with the same symbol on the front and back as was on the gate. Shields, both round and squared, lay carelessly to the side but swords of simple quality were strapped to their hips. Without a word or a glance, the soldiers marched back the way they had come, their feet beating an even beat on the hard track.
The guard, as tall as Hakon but even broader of shoulder and chest, looked them up and down. ‘Not the most impressive arrivals we’ve ever had, I must admit. Still, you’re here, so I’d as well introduce you to the boss.’ He glanced at the note in his hand, and grinned cheerfully. ‘I see you are fighting death bouts tomorrow, so you could probably get away with not bothering to have to try to remember everybody’s names until after that, if you see what I mean.’ He slapped Brann on the back. ‘Every cloud, and all that, eh? But if you can remember one name, you might as well make it Cassian’s. He’s the boss. Hence the name of this place: the School of Cassian. Makes sense, eh? Why not? If you can remember another name, I’m Salus. Salus the Silent, on account that I’m not. I like to remind the world that I’m alive. Especially myself.’
He steered them up a wide straight pathway of white loose stones that crunched with every step. It ran a short way to a wide, two-storey building, as white-walled and red-roofed as every other structure in the city. The path widened at the building and, to one side, a cart of provisions was being unloaded. Brann looked appreciatively at the two horses in the traces, their heads bowed into buckets of water and the tail of one lifting to drop shit on the carefully maintained path.
After coming so close to death, giddiness was coursing through him and he laughed as he nudged Grakk and nodded at the scene. ‘So much for order everywhere and everything being controlled!’
Grakk looked at him through narrowed eyes. ‘You forget you will most probably die tomorrow?’
Brann shrugged. ‘I just can’t forget that I should be dead just now. But I’m not.’
Grakk was unconvinced.
Salus, however, was more appreciative. ‘That’s the spirit, lad. Take each moment as it comes, and don’t plan too far ahead. Cassian likes a happy place, that he does. Uncle Cass, we often call him, as he’s like the favourite uncle you hear about other people having and wish you had yourself. Well, you do now. For a day at least. Come and let’s find him.’
They entered the cool of the building and were directed by a servant along a side corridor. ‘Down here we go,’ Salus informed them. ‘I forgot the time of day. The boss is bathing.’
‘He’s what?’ Brann thought the word sounded a bit rude.
Amusement had started to break through the melancholy in Grakk’s eyes. ‘It is similar to washing.’
‘Well why didn’t he say that?’
Grakk did actually smile this time. ‘You will see.’
A guard stood before a heavy door. Salus nodded to him and entered, motioning for Brann and Grakk to wait where they were as a cloud of steam drifted past. Moments later, he reappeared, affable as ever. Wary as he was after the encounter with the Emperor of words delivered with a smile, still Brann couldn’t help but warm to the man. He frowned slightly at that before his thoughts were interrupted by their subject. ‘You can come now,’ Salus said, beckoning.
The steam swirled as they entered but was filtering quickly out through vents in the ceiling, allowing Brann to see a tiled antechamber, the walls on either side stepped back in two stages to allow wooden benches to run the length of the room and then, higher, a shelf that bore a pile of towels at one end. A pile of clothing lay strewn on one bench.
Salus strode across slatted wooden flooring that kept their feet raised above the treacherous-looking slippery tiles of the floor beneath. An opening at the far end saw them descend two steps into a much bigger room, the source of the steam with three large water-filled tanks producing more swirling clouds that rose to similar vents in this ceiling, every inch of the space around them covered in more of the wooden flooring. High-set windows, long and narrow, let further steam out and dazzling beams of sunlight in, sparkling the water in the tanks that were square, set in line and each around the size of the Captain’s cabin back on the Blue Dragon. Brann resolved to find a new unit of measurement – the thought of the excited anticipation of the voyage to this city had stabbed a pain in the heart of his chest. He clenched his fists to steady his thoughts.
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