S A C R E D S C A R S

by
kathleen duey

CHAPTER 1

Sadima sat cross-legged on the cold stone, just outside the cage. She was holding her slate so the boys could see the symbol she had drawn. Most of them were trying to copy it. Two stolen lanterns hung from the iron bars above their heads, held in place by some Market Square merchant’s missing tarp hooks. The rest of the vast cavern was dark.

Listening for the sound of Franklin’s footsteps in the long entrance passage at the far end of the big chamber, Sadima pulled at a loose thread in her ragged skirt. Somiss had no coins to spend, and they needed everything, so Franklin had become a thief. He left the cliffs at dark and returned at dawn, carrying sacks of stolen goods, swaying like a farm mule under the weight. He was nearly always exhausted when he got back, ready to collapse on his blankets.

Sadima pushed her hair back over her shoulder, wishing Franklin would come, trying not to imagine him running, king’s guards close behind him. Thieves were often hanged. If the guards realized who he was, it would be worse than that. Much worse.

Sadima tucked her skirt between her bare feet and the cold stone. She had shoes, but they were buried in a box in the woods. She had meant to go get them long ago, before winter closed in. But Somiss had forbidden her to leave the cliffs and she knew that if she disobeyed him, he wouldn’t punish her. He would punish Franklin. Sadima lowered her head to keep the boys from seeing her fear—and her anger.

Somiss was clever. He was used to servants, silk, delicate pastries, the endless round of entertainments in his father’s royal house. So was Franklin, in his own way. Neither one of them had understood what it would mean to live in the caverns and tunnels they had found inside Limori’s cliffs. Neither one had even thought of blankets.

Somiss had been violent at first, raging at Franklin, at the cold, the darkness, his own hunger and thirst. But night by night, Franklin had robbed the rich of their heavy woolen comforters until there were enough for all to sleep upon and under. Then he had brought lanterns, water buckets, food, paper, ink quills—and everything else.

Sadima looked up. Most of the boys had stopped drawing. “Let me see what you’ve done. Six of the ten turned their slates toward her. Four had fallen asleep sitting up, chalk wedged between their fingers or dropped on the floor.

Jux’s copy was nearly perfect and when she smiled at him, he sat up straighter. “You’re all getting better,” she lied, looking one by one into the faces of the boys who had at least tried. Most of them avoided her eyes. The biggest boy, Mabiki, lay down, yawning and dull eyed. His dark, curly hair was filthy and tangled and when he reached to push it off his forehead, his slate skidded sideways. Jux leapt up and grabbed it, then passed it through the bars. Sadima set it aside, glad it hadn’t broken. Jux and Mabiki. None of the others would tell her their names. Jux had explained it—only the king’s guards and magistrates had ever wanted to know. It scared them.

Sadima wiped her slate and drew another symbol. She held it up and the boys started over. At first, they had jostled and argued; it had been hard to make them sit still for their lessons. Now, they barely spoke, barely moved. They had come from hard lives; they were street orphans. It hurt Sadima to imagine that. No warm suppers. No one ever looking out for them. She was sure none of them had ever held so much as a lump of charcoal to draw a game of jump-and-stop on a boardwalk. Still, somehow, Somiss expected them to learn to fair copy.

Jux was looking at his slate, correcting a line. He was the only one who could draw the Gypsy symbols accurately—and he was by far the fastest at Ferrinides letters. Sadima smiled at him again and he smiled back, lifting his chin. She nodded, then looked at the other boys in the cage to keep from staring at the terrible rose and putty colored scar that crossed Jux’s throat and disappeared behind his ear. How old was he? Seven? Eight? Someone had already tried to cut his throat. And now Somiss had put him in a cage.

Sadima thought she heard a sound and turned, hoping to see Franklin’s lantern, a tiny amber star shining from across the darkness of the big cavern. But he wasn’t back. Not yet. She drew another symbol for the boys to copy. Then another.

It was a long time before Franklin finally got back, his back bent under the weight of the supplies he was carrying. Sadima jumped up and walked toward the light of his lantern, leaving her own behind to have both hands free to help him. He kissed her. She closed her eyes to feel the touch of his lips more clearly. He would sleep all day, then be gone again at dark. Dawn and dusk; these were the only moments they had together now. I miss you. She started to say it, but he spoke first.

“Has Somiss come out of his chamber?”
Sadima took one of the heavy bags from him, hitched it over her shoulder. “No.”
Franklin nodded. “Good. He’s angry about something.”
“At you?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
But he did know. She could tell.

 CHAPTER 2

I wiped my aching eyes and closed the history book. It was dull as dirt, I was sick of reading about the brilliant Founder—and our little chamber was filled with acrid lamp smoke. The stone stonealls were coated in oily soot.

I lay the book down and glanced at Gerrard across the narrow aisle that separated our cots. He was crosslegged, facing away from me as always, studying. He reached up to rub his eyes. How long had it taken the wizards to realize soot-clotted lamps could torture students? Three years? A century? And of course they were doing this to us now, when we had to read constantly to memorize the songs.

It was like the sackcloth robes that had rubbed our skin off in bloody patches, never getting to eat enough, sleep enough, make a friend, or anything else that would have eased the constant fear. Everything the wizards did fit together as precisely as the bronze and copper pulleys on my father’s collection of crossbows.The wizards made it hard to study, nearly impossible to learn. I was starting to wonder how long had it been since anyone had graduated from the Limori Academy? Ten years? Fifty? I felt the familiar rush of fear and anger, mixed, and glanced at Gerrard again.

His hair was tied back with a twist of threads he had pulled from his robe hem. He had been the first to do it. I had tried to make scissors four or five times and couldn’t. I don’t know if anyone else had tried, but I had given up. Most of us tied our hair back now.
Gerrard’s shoulders were squared. I knew what it meant. I had spent so many hours staring at his back, afraid to interrupt him, trying to figure him out. He wasn’t like anyone I had ever known. He wasn’t like any of the rest of us. He was so intent on being the one to graduate that nothing the wizards did seemed to distract him for long.

They had lined up all ten of us on the first day, as our parents were leaving, going bac through the enormous doors and out into the daylight. Then the wizards had marched us through the maze of stone passages to our chambers: Two rooms of four students, and one room with Gerrard and me. Four boys had starved because they couldn’t learn how to make food. Four.

Every time I thought about it, I started to shake. Four dead, six alive. Somiss had made it very clear; one would graduate—or none, if no one merited it. I believed it now. They didn’t care if we all died. Somiss acted like he would prefer it that way. He might get his wish.

None of us were great students. Me, Gerrard, poor Will, who had lost all three of his roommates, Luke, who hated me, Levin, the only one I had known before coming here, and Jordan, whose dark eyes had been merry at first. None of us did everything well—we all struggled to keep up, to stay alive.

I lay down on my cot and closed my stinging eyes. Gerrard was so serious about studying that he almost never spoke to me. I barely knew any of the other students—except Levin because we had gone to the same school, a real one, before my father had brought me here. But we didn’t now. No one did, not before or after class or in the food hall. Somiss had forbidden us to help each other on our first day. We were all scared of him.

Gerrard had said once that the wizards didn’t listen to us in our rooms. He had said a lot of things he couldn’t possibly know. For the hundredth time I wondered why the wizards hadn’t just put each of us in a room alone. Maybe to keep us from going mad sooner than they wanted?

One thing I was sure of: The wizards had worked out all of this over centuries. None of us knew where the others’ rooms were in the worm-hole maze of stone passages. Our classes were in different places almost every time, and a wizard we had never seen before woke us up every morning. If we had class, he led us there. If not, he walked away once we shouted to let them know we were up. None of them ever spoke to us.

Besides our roommates, we saw each other only in class or in the food hall. At first, Somiss had hidden in the shadows, there. A few times he had just walked in suddenly, scaring the piss out of all of us. He terrified me. His eyes were expressionless and so light they looked clear. His voice was graveled, rough and deep. I missed Franklin, now that his classes were over. He hadn’t kept anyone from dying, but he wasn’t as cruel as Somiss; he didn’t seem to enjoy starving and scaring us.

I had heard his voice inside my head a few times, encouraging me, telling me he had waited for a student like me to come along. I knew I had probably daydreamed it, but it hadn’t mattered. It still didn’t. Whether it had really happened or not, thinking I was important to Franklin had helped me live through the first year. If it really had been a year. That’s what he had told us, in his last class.

“How long do you think we have been here?” I asked Gerrard.
He didn’t answer.
“Three years?”
He pretended not to hear me.
“Three years?” I repeated. “Have we been here about three years?”

He turned to look at me and I could see that he hadn’t really heard me. I knew the feeling. The things we studied required a strange, complete concentration. I repeated the question.
“At least two,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me,” I whispered.

He didn’t say anything. I turned over and faced the wall. We were all much taller than when our parents had left us here, that was obvious. Our bodies were changing. We would all turn into men in these dark, smelly tunnels, if we lived long enough. Thinking about it that way brought the usual heavy, cold feeling into my stomach. I got up and went to piss in the slops bucket, then began the third breathing pattern while I washed my hands and splashed my face at the basin. I touched the spigot to stop the water, then just stood there, breathing. It had seemed stupid at first, going to Franklin’s breathing classes. But it helped. Sometimes it was the only thing that did. That and the secret.

Gerrard and I had made a pact—to help each other even though it was forbidden—then to destroy this place. Maybe the wizards already knew about it and were just waiting to punish us. I hoped not. I wanted to live and I wanted Somiss to die. And my father—for sending me here. He had known he would probably never see me again. He had known that would break my mother’s heart. He hadn’t cared about either of us.

I pushed the thoughts about my parents out of my mind and downward, into my feet, where I could barely hear them. Then I looked at Gerard again. I was hungry. Was he? His back was straight, his chin was up and he was completely absorbed in studying. But his shoulder blades poked against his robe like broken wings. We were all stick-thin.

I rubbed my raw eyes again, then picked up the song book: The Songs of the Elders. We didn’t sing them. If there were tunes, no one was teaching them to us. Reciting the words was hard enough. I sat on my cot and flipped the pages. With Gerrard’s help I was keeping up—barely. With my help, he was catching up with the parts of Franklin’s class that had been hard for him. He was learning to move his thoughts. I already could. So maybe we would be all right.

Maybe. Maybe. May Bee. Maybe. Maybe. MAY bee.
The word, repeating itself inside my skull, got louder. This had happened many times before. I used the fifth breathing pattern, slowing and silencing my thoughts the way Franklin had taught us. It was possible Gerrard and I could destroy the Limori Academy, if we both worked very hard, kept our secret, and survived long enough to learn enough. It was just barely possible, but not impossible.

I had a favorite daydream about going home. My father would be startled and scared, seeing me in black robes. Wizards scared him. They scared everybody. I had to believe that day would come—I had to. I realized I was breathing hard when Gerrard turned and glanced at me.
“You all right?”

I nodded and he went back to his reading. Soon, the only sound was Gerrard’s quiet breathing and my own, both of us using the sixth pattern. I closed my eyes. They changed the length of our days all the time, but I was pretty sure I had time to sleep.