“Efea will rise,” she says, but she has fresh bruises on her arms because she had to go on water rounds in my place. She doesn’t sound as if she believes it.
That night I become delirious and slip in and out, waking in sweats, shivering until I’m exhausted, then sweating again as my thoughts spin and spin. We’ll wait until shift’s end to pull down all the guards and pound them over and over with rocks until they’re dead. We’ll wait until a new supply train comes, and raid the kitchen for supplies as we flee across the Stone Desert where nothing lives. We’ll die there, and crows will peck out our eyes.
It doesn’t matter. Once I regain my strength we will fight. We have to, even if they kill us, even if the desert kills us. We’re dying anyway. I won’t let Gargaron win.
19
After some days my fever subsides and I resume my duties as water carrier. Even those days were too many for Djesa, although she does not complain. What point is there?
I’m shaky on my feet, persistently light-headed, and my wrist hurts if I put any pressure on it, but I am strangely hopeful. Maraya will come through. I’m so sure of it that I plot out a daring plan of attack, which I share with those I trust most: Djesa in the kitchen, Menesis and his cohort of laborers, Beswe and a few other trusted women, Anu among the boys, and Selukon and the other Tonor men.
“Whether we win or lose, my suffering will soon be over,” Selukon confides with philosophical cheerfulness. “I just wish that I could smash a rock into Lord Gargaron’s face in payment before I go. We had a decent life in Clan Tonor.”
I’m no longer feverish but my brow is puffy, and I can’t decide if that means the inflammation is getting better or worse, although the head cook—the closest thing the mine has to a healer—covers it with a salve every evening. I keep moving. Our hidden caches of discarded stone tools grow. I’m no longer worried about supplies for the journey; I’ve worked out how to deal with that.
If Maraya comes through.
She will because she’s the cleverest of us girls. Because she’s also one of Father’s daughters, the firebird’s heirs, who subsist on air and courage.
When the supply train arrives for its next scheduled visit I hang about in the shade, and I’m not surprised to see Polodos. This time I’m smarter. I go straight to the lavatory courtyard and wait in a shadowed corner amid the stink until he appears, alone, looking cautiously around.
“Jessamy?”
It’s so sweet to hear my name. “Here.”
He pulls a leather pouch from his sleeve. It’s small enough I can hide it in my vest. “She said to tell you that under no circumstances should you touch the powder with bare skin or else you too will be poisoned. It acts quickly and will incapacitate most. Many will die. The rest you must kill. Can you kill people, Jessamy? Have you really thought about what this means?”
“If we are merciful and let them live, they’ll raise the alarm and come after us and kill us before we can hope to escape. I see no other way.”
“So I fear. Add extra spice to cover the taste. Make sure you burn or bury the pouch. Let all the dead look as if they have been killed by violence so no one suspects poison was involved.” With a disquieting frown, he touches my forehead, just above my inflamed eye, and slips a tiny sealed pot into my hand. “She says you must use this salve on your eye.”
“How is she?”
“Her position in Lord Menos’s household protects her. For now we are safe, as you are not.”
I wait one day.
One long day.
In the first few days after the supply wagons come, the guards and the servants in the priest’s compound eat particularly well. They are served fish from the coast, fruit that doesn’t grow here because there is too little water, and imported delicacies.
Timing is everything. Workers are fed a ration of gruel at dusk but the priest, his servants, and the guards enjoy a midday meal as well. Djesa distracts the head cook as a fish soup simmers, and I pour in the powder as well as an extra dollop of spices. If anyone is caught, let it be me.
The midday meal is carried into the compound and barracks by the priest’s servants. I want to carry the soup to the mine guards myself but that would break the routine. A pair of kitchen servants lug a full pot and ladle up the road with a basket of freshly cooked bread on their backs. In the back of the kitchen, the cook’s assistant complains that his stomach is upset and runs to the latrine. Djesa beckons to me, and we peek into the head cook’s private courtyard to see him vomiting onto the stones, hands clenched at his belly.
“You know what to do,” I say to her.
To my surprise, she kisses me on the cheek like a sister. Her gaze is fierce and wild. “Efea will rise,” she whispers.
It’s here. It’s now.
I grab my bundle of filled water bottles. This time of day it is too hot to run and twice I have to pause in the shade because the heat makes me dizzy. But the weakness burns away as I climb the last slope, passing Beswe staggering under a heavy load of rocks. I nod at her, and she halts with a look of stunned fear that shifts to grim resolve.
“Back again, Mule Bountiful?” The first guard leers as I walk up. “You look so hungry these days. I’ll trade you my ladle of soup for a kiss.”
“It’s too cursed spicy,” says the other guard with a grimace. “I feel sick.”
“You gulped it down too fast,” replies the other guard, and I realize he’s not had any.
This is our only chance. So I do it because I don’t know what else to do. I shove one guard into the other and as they stumble, confused by my aggression, I push with all my might. The one who complained of feeling sick falls into the shaft, screaming. But the other guard catches himself, one leg dangling over the rim. I kick at his shoulders, trying to tip him over, but he grabs at me so I have to jump back. I stumble, off balance, and he leaps to his feet, his face red and expression murderous.
The two Efeans who work the pulley gape like comical actors.
“Efea will rise. Efea will rise!” My shouts echo down into the shaft. “Act now, while they’re weak from poison!”
The men at the pulley let go of the rope. As the platform plunges, one of them grapples with the guard. But the guard is bigger, stronger, healthier, and shoves him away. As he slides his short sword free of its sheath, Beswe runs up. She lobs two rocks at him at such close range that they both hit. I tackle him and hold on to his legs as Beswe drops a big milling stone on his abdomen. The other man grabs a rock and bashes it into the guard’s face over and over until he stops screaming and fighting. Somehow there is blood all over my hands.
A clamor has broken out below.