Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [206]
“See someone you recognize?” Soldt asked, tugging gently on Cauvin’s sleeve.
How to answer? He’d seen a girl, a few years older than he’d been.
The summer sun had just risen, but already it turned the pits into ovens and she was too weak to crawl out of its light, too weak to whisk away the flies buzzing around her eyes and mouth. She’d been sick for a week. Now she was dying, not quickly enough. If she couldn’t climb out of the pit when the Hand overseers lowered the ladders, they’d drag her out and take her to the Mother’s altar.
“Please? Please?” Her lips formed the words. She was too weak, too parched to make a sound. Her hand twitched, reaching for his?
Cauvin couldn’t remember what had happened next. He didn’t remember them dragging her to the altar. Maybe that was memory enough. He stared at the sky and blinked.
“No, no one.”
“Come on, then. Let’s find this majordomo.”
“Right,” he agreed, and turned back toward the exchange.
The Hand never did an honest day’s work, not when they had a steady supply of orphans to order about. Cauvin and the others hauled jugs of water and jugs of night soil. They baked the bread, and they washed the linen, whenever some mighty Hand decided it needed to be washed. They scrubbed the floors around the Mother’s altar, and they climbed onto the steep, slippery roofs after every storm looking for broken tiles. No froggin’ way some mighty Hand was going to have water dripping on his or her froggin’ face at night.
The roof hadn’t changed much and the tiles were still apt to break in a gale-force wind and men still had to check them after every storm. They worked in three-man teams, linked by long ropes. Two men with steady footing hugged the crest and guided a third man, who worked his way up and down, back and forth. If the third man slipped—and it was a man slipping that had caught Cauvin’s eye—the ropes snapped taut. Froggin’ sure he’d have busted ribs and rope burns along his flanks, but his two keepers had kept him alive.
Cauvin would rather have cleaned the middens than check the roof tiles; and the same storms that loosened roof tiles flooded the middens. At first, he’d found ways to get put on midden duty, but Whip—damn him to Hecath’s foulest hell—figured out that Cauvin feared heights. After that he was climbing ladders every time it rained, humping tiles before the last drops had fallen. He wasn’t ever the only orphan scrambling across the roof, but they didn’t work in teams and the only ropes were those each orphan used to lower the broken tiles and fetch up new ones.
It was late autumn—same time of year as now. Cauvin and the other roof-crawlers were barefoot. The tiles were so froggin’ cold his feet were numb to his froggin’ knees. The Hand had him working the lower courses of tile, the rows closest to the edge, the rows that frightened him more than the high courses near the crest. He’d spotted a cracked tile below his knee and the temptation was to pretend he hadn’t seen it—but that was risky. The Hand weren’t just brutes and bastards, they’d been truly consecrated by the Mother of Chaos and any one of them might be looking at the roof through his eyes at that very moment, seeing what he saw, waiting for him to shirk, waiting for him with the long, thin flaying knife when he got down to flat ground again.
The worst kind of death the Hand delivered wasn’t when they peeled an entire skin. That froggin’ bastard screamed and howled, but he was dead long before they finished. No, the worst was when the Hand flayed just an arm or a leg or peeled a circle of skin they called the “Mother’s Face” off some poor pud’s belly. Froggin’ sure, the red flesh underneath would swell and weep. It would draw flies, turn black, and stink like the rotting meat it was until the pud died. That could take a month.
So, Cauvin had scrabbled down to the very edge and gotten to work prying out the broken tile. Bits of broken, baked clay clattered to the brink and