The Dark Citadel (The Green Woman) Read Free Page B

her
neighbour, her voice a conspiratorial whisper. “Indeed it has, Goodwife. It has
been visited on their babies. I have seen it in the House of Births with my own
eyes. They are punished for their greed all right. Horrible some of them are.
Limbs come out all wrong. There was even one with two heads!” She shuddered.
    “It’s kinder to cull them,” Goodwife Artemis said,
flicking a bit of dust from her sleeve.
    Goodwife Fatima nodded. “It’s just putting them out
of their misery.” She made the gesture of sticking an imaginary syringe into an
imaginary baby’s heart. “And as for the healthy ones, well, there are just too
many of them, aren’t there? They breed like battery rabbits! Having their
babies on the quiet at home won’t save them either. All yesterday we were
packing up doses for the birthers to take into the Ignorant tenements. They’ll
get them all sooner or later, don’t you worry.” She chuckled to herself. “After
all, you can’t take a two-headed kid with no legs to the shop without somebody
noticing it, can you?”
    “But they’d do it, wouldn’t they? Disgusting, they
are. No respect for the rest of us.” Goodwife Artemis wrinkled her nose as if
she could smell the drains.
    Goodwife Fatima’s voice took on an indignant tone.
“Of course it’s for their own good. But do they see it like that? They had the
nerve to cause a rumpus outside the House of Births this morning, had to have
the Black Boys called out for them.” She shook her head. “Some people. You just
can’t help them, can you?”
    Goodwife Artemis turned back into her own doorway,
and Deborah ducked out of sight into her tiny room next to the kitchen. For
once, good sense had prevailed and she had not stormed out and told piggy-eyed
Artemis what she thought of her. Her husband Jeremiah hung around with a scribe
at the Ministry of Justice.
    Lying in her narrow bed, Deborah mulled over what
she had heard. Horror mingled with disgust as images of babies convulsing in
their death throes and distraught, hair-tearing mothers filled her head. And
these people dared to criticise her? She didn’t kill babies, she fumed.
    Serpent, they called her, and not just behind her
back. She knew she frightened people. It was difficult to ignore the way adults
avoided her eyes or the uneasy, furtive glances of the other girls.
    Serpent! They said her mother ran away because she
was an adulteress. Why then had Deborah’s father planned to go with her?
Deborah re-ran her memories of the scene, of her mother’s last anguished look
before she ran out of sight into the desert, her father, blood pouring from a
leg wound, reaching out to her, the silver-clad guard scooping up her
five-year-old self and bundling her back into the city.
    But were they real memories, or a fiction she had
invented to ease the pain of being abandoned? She saw so many things nobody
else could see, visions that came in blinding flashes that made her head hurt.
She saw unimaginably bright colours, extraordinary growing, living things. And
people. Their smiling faces were filled with expressions of tenderness and
affection, and something deeper she remembered from years ago. She wanted to
reach out to these faces and touch them. They must belong to people who had
been close to her, resurfacing from the deep recesses of her memory.
    Deborah knew she must never tell anyone about these
visions, because they belonged to her real life, not the cold, harsh existence
with Titus and Fatima. They belonged to a life the Elders thought they had
destroyed.
    As Deborah lay in her bed, wanting her parents back
more than anything in the world, her head was filled with an aching flash. She saw
a woman’s face, young, with damp, tousled red hair, beads of sweat on her lip,
and tears welling up in her eyes despite the broad smile on her full lips. The
face came closer and closer, until Deborah’s vision was filled with green eyes
and dark red lashes and the smiling lips. Her heart