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by Therese Arkenberg
Dark Fantasy, 8 pages.
Originally Published in Labyrinth Inhabitant, 2008
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Raishya was fourteen when she decided to see what was at the center of the Wall. It started with a dare—not to her, but to her brother. Taden was down on the Ground between two walls, playing in the brambles with the other boys his age. They were playing tag, and Evin was losing, and maybe that was why he decided to make the dare.
“Betcha you won’t go all the way to Center,” he said, quite suddenly. He often said things suddenly, and often with no real reason; it startled the other children when he did and that didn’t earn him a lot of friends.
But a dare was a dare, whoever made it. “I’ll go to Center,” Taden said, drawing himself up proudly, “if you’ll go Outside.”
“By smoke ‘n fire,” one of the boys gasped. While Center was cloaked with an air of mystery, Outside held more concrete dangers. Outside was where the men came from every month with the supplies that weren’t available on the Wall: grain and feed and cloth and meat that didn’t come from birds caught on the rooftops. People could raise goats and gardens on the Ground between walls, but they had no space for fields to grow wheat or cotton. And the iron they used to build and repair and defend the Wall came from Outside, too, but also what they defended against: foreign men who would not be turned away at the Gate House. Men who might want to kidnap a kid from the Wall, to see if they could somehow use him to get to Center.
But on the other hand...
“I’ll go Outside,” Evin settled, “If you go and tell me what’s in Center.”
Taden blanched. “I... I...”
He was caught between two walls, for sure. From her perch on the wall above, Raishya snickered. Taden was a coward, really. She used to play with him when they were little, since there were no other girls her age on the Wall, but he was too slow and cautious to have any fun with, so she stayed on her own now. Maybe Evin and the others would give up on him too one day.
“Okay. I’ll do it. I’ll tell you what’s in Center.” Taden turned and began scaling the wall, shoving his fingers into chinks in the crumbling mortar. He hauled himself up beside Raishya.
“I’ll go to Center for you,” she said.
He jumped. “Sneak!”
“Sure I am. But I’ll go to Center for you.”
“What?”
“Do I have to say it again?”
“But... why?”
She shrugged. “I’ll go and I’ll tell you what I see, and then you can tell Evin and pretend you were brave and went for yourself. Then Evin’ll have to go Outside, and people’ll think you’re okay and I won’t have to be a coward’s sister anymore.”
“You still won’t have any friends,” he snarled.
“Do you want me to go to Center for you or not?”
“Fine.” He looked over the roofs and towers of the Wall. Towards Center. “You can go.”
Raishya smiled.
* * *
She waited until her parents had fallen asleep. Taden, she knew, was still up, watching her across the tiny tower room that was the family’s apartment, checking to be sure she would go, probably. Stupid boy. Didn’t he know that girls don’t go back on their promises?
At least, Raishya didn’t.
She waited a few minutes more before getting up from the couch. Her father stirred in his sleep but didn’t rise. Taden’s eyes creaked open to slits, then slammed shut. Raishya didn’t laugh, but she wanted to.
The door was squeaky, so she climbed through the window instead. It was a little hard, especially the part when she inched around the tower to where she could get her feet on the wall, but at least nobody noticed her. And now she had proven she could be brave. Probably nobody else on the Wall could climb around a tower as high as her family’s in the middle of the night.
The stone of a hundred walls shone in the moonlight like a lapping sea, stretching to every horizon. Here and there the spike of a tower pointed up at a star or simply into the dark sky. Each wall and many a tower was a patchwork: fine masonry there, mortared rubble right beside it, repairs and additions, improvements and defacements, from all the hundreds of years of the Wall’s history. The plots of Ground were covered with brambles, vines, or overgrown grass: wider spots held goat pens or gardens, nearly impossible to see in the shadows. The blue-roofed welltowers stood with their doors open, empty. Same with the red-peaked privies. Nobody would see Raishya.
Narrow bridges crossed between walls. Few of them had rails, and in the darkness Raishya walked carefully in case she slipped and fell fifteen feet to the ground. The going was really bad where two walls were not the same height and the bridge between them sloped up or down. A mist was rolling in, too, making the stone slick.
Light still blazed from a few of the towers, families finishing supper or watchmen’s wives waiting for them to return from the outmost wall and Gate House. A privy door slammed, and Raishya hi -- [End of Preview.]