The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,86
soon after and left me to myself again.
32
I give a lot of thought, on a lot of occasions, to what Catrin said to me that night. It was hard for me to come to a solid understanding of it.
She said she was for order. That she didn’t want discontent and enmities in the village, since our surviving depended on us all facing the one way. It was the same thing she said to Haijon after Ursala killed the drone. Anything that makes people slower in doing what Ramparts tell them to do is bad.
I could see the sense in that, for all I didn’t want to. What I didn’t see was why Ramparts had got to be just Vennastins and nobody else. Catrin’s order was not the only kind of order there could be. It was just the kind that was best for her kin. Surely it would be better for the village if everyone could use the tech, and not just one family. Better if they took turns with it maybe, and likewise took turns to lead the Count and Seal on meet days, so power and choosing was things that everybody got an equal taste of.
Or maybe it wouldn’t be no better at all. If there was fifty people that could use the firethrower, and only one at a time that got to hold it, how long would it be before the one that was holding it refused to give it up? Maybe we’d fight each other and hurt each other for a bigger share of what was rightly everyone’s at once or nobody’s ever.
Maybe one voice telling everyone what to do is the best way to go about things when all the world is sharpening its knives for you and you got no chance at all but what you make.
But like I told you, these thoughts didn’t come to me until later. What I thought then, that night, both when Catrin was with me and after she left, was about what was going on over my head, up in Rampart Hold. I thought that when the Ramparts took me, they never meant to keep me for three days, or even for one. Maybe they thought they had got to make me show them how the DreamSleeve worked, but that was a small thing next to making sure I didn’t tell nobody what I had figured out about them and how they did what they did with all the old tech.
So if I was still alive, it was on account of there being some disagreement, way up there, on how to go with this. I did not doubt that Mardew was saying to kill me, but Mardew’s voice counted for little next to his older kin. I’m reckoning it out right now with my father and my sister. So that was where the disagreement lay, and it was the reason for me still being here, three days on.
Catrin had told me true. She wanted to protect her family and keep them where they was all up on top of things. But she wasn’t dead set on taking the straightest way, which was to get a knife and cut my throat, or burn me up with the firethrower so nobody would even recognise me if they found me.
I might live yet, and come out of this room, though I couldn’t see the shape of how that might be.
33
There was one more meal. By my count it was a breakfast. Then Fer Vennastin, Rampart Arrow, and Mardew, Rampart Knife, come to take me up into Rampart Hold.
“You can run if you want to,” Mardew told me as he pushed me out of the room. He had the cutter on his hand and the bar was shining silver, ready to fire. If I run, he would cut me off at the knees before I took three steps. So I said nothing, but only climbed the stairs ahead of the two of them. My legs was weak from my nights of sleeping on stone and sitting through most of the day, but even if I was hale I still would of walked as slow as if I was climbing up a mountain. I wasn’t going to give Mardew no excuses.
We come up at last in the main corridor, and I seen my count was wrong. There was dark outside the windows, except for the Milk Way splashed across the middle of the sky. It was full night.