They Came to Buy My Sister, So I Went in Her Place as a Boy novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Gate

At the fortress gate the steward writes both names in the ledger; Itziar counts the walls and the hours, and a man in the dark yard watches her count.

The fortress came out of the dark all at once, a long grey wall with one lantern burning over a gate.

We had ridden four hours up the pass in snow, and I had counted every turn in the road.

Eleven bends, one ford, and a chapel with no roof.

I counted them because counting was what kept me from thinking about Amaia's back in front of the rider, small and stiff on his saddle.

The place had been a monastery once.

I could see that from the bell tower leaning against the stars and the long stone cloister on the river side.

The river Saison ran loud and black around three sides of the wall.

Only the front was dry, and the front was a gate of black oak with iron bands.

"Hand over," the older rider called.

A shutter opened in the gate, and a lantern swung out on a pole.

The gate opened.

Inside, a courtyard of packed earth stretched away under a ring of lit windows.

A man waited for us on a stool by a table with a book open on it.

He was old, stooped, and white-haired, with a black wool coat and a rosary wound twice around his wrist.

When he stood, one leg dragged.

"Gotzon," the rider said to him.

"Two this time.

"The girl is the debt.

"The boy came in her place, or beside her, or whatever he thinks he did."

The old man looked at me.

I looked at the book.

It was a big ledger bound in cracked leather, with a column of names down the page in a slow, careful hand.

He dipped his pen.

"Name," he said to my sister.

"Amaia Etxeberria," she said, in a voice that barely carried.

"Age."

"Sixteen."

He wrote it.

Then he turned to me and waited, and the lantern light showed me his face.

It was long and tired and not unkind.

He looked at my cap and my cropped hair and the coat that hung off me, and one white eyebrow went up.

I did not know why.

"Xabier Etxeberria," I said.

"Nineteen."

He wrote that too.

He did not look at the ledger when he wrote it.

He looked at me.

"Welcome to the house of Larrea, Xabier," he said.

"The women's side is across the cloister.

"The men sleep in the long hall.

"You eat at the first bell and work at the second."

"My sister?" I said.

"Your sister will be fed and kept warm."

He closed the book.

Before he did, I saw the page above ours.

I read names the way I read my own house's, one shape at a time.

There were twenty or more, in the same pen and the same slow hand.

At the top of the page, a line had been drawn in a different ink.

Under it, one name was written alone.

It was a woman's, not a family I knew.

There was no debt beside it and no sum.

Beside every other name there was a figure.

That one had none.

I didn't know what it meant.

I filed it with the rest, the way I filed the number of steps from the stable to the kitchen door.

A woman came across the yard with a shawl and took Amaia by the arm.

She was thin and stern, and she spoke to my sister in a voice that was almost gentle.

"Come, child.

"There's soup."

Amaia looked back at me.

I nodded once, the way I nodded to the dog when I left him with the flock.

I watched her walk across the cloister and through a low arch until the lantern showed me nothing.

The long hall smelled of damp straw, smoke and forty men.

They lay in rows on pallets under a vaulted ceiling black with old fires.

Nobody spoke to me.

Somebody pointed at a free pallet by the wall, and I took it and lay down in my brother's coat with my back against the stone.

I was not afraid of the men.

I had slept in huts with shepherds from three valleys since I was fourteen, and a boy who keeps his cap on and his mouth shut is left alone.

What I was afraid of was the stone.

It was a wall four paces thick, and I had no way yet of knowing how to get through it.

So I counted.

The wall behind my head was twelve of my strides from the gate.

The gate had one bar and two iron hinges.

The river ran around three sides, so the only road out was the gate or the water.

The water was loud, black and cold enough to kill a man in half an hour.

I had seen it take my father.

I lay there and listened to the long hall breathe.

Somebody near the door was coughing, and somebody else snored.

The dinner had been mutton.

I thought about that.

A debtor in a poorhouse eats barley, and the Bear fed us mutton, thick, with onions and bread.

It didn't fit what I knew about a man who bought girls.

I turned it over and put it away for later.

Some time after the second bell, I got up.

I told myself I needed air.

What I needed was to see the kitchen yard and the gate again.

The long hall's door opened onto a stone passage, and the passage went to a small yard with a well.

The wall on the east side had a low door in it.

I stood in the dark and looked at that door for a long time.

It had a latch and a bar, and the bar was leaning against the wall, not across the door.

I put my hand on the latch.

It lifted.

The door was not locked.

I stood with the latch cold under my thumb and the river loud beyond it and told myself it was a trap.

Nobody leaves a door open in a prison.

"You count the way my father counted sheep," a man said behind me.

I didn't jump.

I had learned not to jump.

I let my hand fall from the latch and turned around slowly, with my cap pulled low.

He stood in the passage mouth, where the light from the long hall did not reach.

He was tall, taller than the riders, with a black beard and a sheepskin jacket thrown over his shoulders like a cloak.

His hands hung loose at his sides, and the left forearm had a long white scar that caught what little light there was.

I had never seen the Bear.

I knew it was him, though, the way you know the weather before it breaks.

"Every night this week," he said, "I've watched the new ones look at that door."

"I came for air," I said.

"Air is on the other side."

He came a step closer.

His voice was low and level and not at all what I'd been told to expect.

"Where did you count from?" he said.

"The gate, to the hall, to the yard.

"Twelve strides, twenty, and seven."

He said nothing.

I watched his face, and I could not tell what it was doing.

"Most of them look at the door," he said at last.

"You looked at the door and the wall, and you counted the walk between.

"Tomorrow, after roll-call, you stay where you are."

"I am only a boy who works," I said.

"Yes," said the Bear.

"I heard that at the gate."

He turned and walked back into the dark without another word.

I stood in the yard with my heart going hard and my hand open on the cold stone.

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