The Alpha Threw Me To The Hyenas

Chapter Five: Cold Meat

They put me in the lower store.

Not a cell. The house did not have cells, which people are always surprised by, but there was nothing in that building that had ever needed one. What it had was a long room under the east wing where the dry goods went, with a stone floor and a drain in the middle of it and a door that locked from the outside because thirty years ago somebody had been taking flour.

I sat on a crate of tinned peaches for a while. Then I sat on the floor with my back against the wall, because the crate was cold in a way the wall was not.

My hands had stopped.

I do not know when. Some time between the hall and the stairs, the blood had simply stopped coming, and by the time somebody put a lamp on in that room the marks on my forearms had closed over into two raised lines like old burns. They did not hurt. They did not hurt at all, and everything else did, my knees from the floor and my arms from the hold and my scalp from an hour of somebody working oil into it, and the only part of me that had actually opened felt like nothing.

I sat there and turned my arms over and looked at them and could not make it mean anything.

The dress was finished. I noticed that too, at some point, in the same flat practical way I had noticed it in the hall. Somebody had spent two days taking it in and letting it out and it had lasted about forty minutes.

I heard her on the stairs before the key went in.

Nobody else in that house walked like Mira. She came down heavy on the right because of her knee and she had been doing it so long that the sound of it was the sound of food coming, and I had known it since I was four years old, and my whole body reacted to it before my head caught up.

The door opened. She came in with a tray and put it on the crate and turned round and looked at me sitting on the floor in the ruined dress, and her face went.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, child."

"I'm all right."

"You are not."

"I'm all right, Mira."

She crossed the room and got down on the floor beside me, which at sixty-one with that knee took her a while and which I would have stopped her doing if I had had anything left. She sat with her back against the same wall and her legs straight out in front of her like a girl, and she reached over and took my left arm and turned it over and looked at the mark.

She did not flinch. Everybody who saw those marks in the next four months flinched. Mira put her thumb along the raised line and traced it once, from the wrist up, and made a small sound in her throat.

"Does it hurt?"

"No."

"That's worse," she said.

She let go of my arm. Then she got up, took another minute doing it, and brought the tray down onto the floor between us.

Bread. A twist of salt in paper. And on a plate, cut thin the way I liked it and laid out properly like it was for somebody, cold meat.

I looked at it for a long time.

"Mira."

"Eat."

"Where did you get that."

"Don't ask me where I got it." She was not looking at me. "Eat it before it warms up."

I picked up a piece and my hand would not close on it properly. The right one had gone stiff through the fingers, and whatever had happened under the skin of the forearm had done something to the grip, and the meat came apart and went back down onto the plate.

I tried again with the left. Same.

I sat there with my hands open on my knees and I did not say anything, because I was twenty-two years old and I had never in my life had to ask anybody for anything.

Mira picked up a piece of the meat and held it out.

"Open your mouth," she said.

So I did.

She fed me on the floor of the lower store with her bad knee straight out in front of her and her back against the stone, and she did not make it into anything. That is what I want said about that woman. She did not cry over me and she did not tell me I was brave. She fed me the way she had fed me every day since I was four, one thing after another, until it was gone.

Then she wiped her hands on her apron and said, "Now you listen."

"Mira."

"They are holding a tribunal on Tuesday."

"I know."

"You do not know, because you have never been to one." She turned so she could see my face. "I have been to four. They ask you three times. Three. They will ask you if you refused, and you will say you were ill and confused and you did not know what you were saying, and they will ask you again, and you will say it again, and the third time they will ask if you accept the bond and you will say yes."

"He won't take it."

"He will take it." Her jaw was set. "That boy nearly went through his father in front of the whole house tonight over you. He will take it and he will be glad to and everybody will pretend for a year and then they will forget, they always forget, I have watched this house forget worse things than you."

"Mira."

"You say yes on Tuesday."

"No."

She hit the crate with the flat of her hand. It was the only time in my life I ever saw her angry, properly angry, and it was not at Halvard Varro or at the tribunal or at any of the four hundred people who had run for the doors.

"For what," she said. "For what, Zaira. Tell me what you bought. You have been in this house since before you could walk and I have watched you eat standing up in a doorway and now you are going to die on that floor upstairs for a man looking at a wall?"

"He was being kind to me."

"Then let him."

"In front of all of them."

"Let him." She had hold of my sleeve. "You let him be kind to you in front of every one of them and you go on letting him for forty years and you die old and fat, and I will be in the ground long before that and I will not have to watch what they do to you on Tuesday."

I did not have an answer to that. I have never had an answer to that.

She let go of my sleeve and sat back against the wall and neither of us said anything for a while. Somewhere above us a door shut and somebody walked across a floor.

"You have her hands," Mira said.

I turned my head.

"What?"

She had gone very still.

"Whose hands," I said.

"Nothing." She was already reaching for the tray. "Nothing, I'm tired, I've been up since four and I'm talking rubbish. Give me the plate."

"Mira, whose hands."

"I said give me the plate."

She would not look at me. She got herself up off that floor without help and she picked up the tray and she got as far as the door before she stopped, with her back to me and her hand on the frame.

"You will say yes on Tuesday," she said.

"No, I won't."

For a moment she did not move at all.

Then she said, quite calmly, without turning round, "Then they will take me too."