The Belly of the Bow by K J Parker

Author:K J Parker
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-11-07T11:01:08+00:00

Machaera woke up with a scream, and opened her eyes.

The dream started to fade, and she was glad to see the back of it; there had been fighting, and men being trampled in the mud; her cousin Remo, thin and dirty, leaning against a gate with a halberd couched in his arms, a burning house with men running out and then dropping to the ground, a sky full of arrows hanging in the air and then falling towards her, a man stripping a corpse and many other unpleasant things she didn’t want to think about. She got out of bed quickly, as if she was afraid some of the horrible things might still be lurking under the pillow, and splashed cold water from the jug onto her face. That seemed to help; her mind was clearing, and when she looked out of the window she saw that the sun was already up. She sighed; twice in a row now she’d overslept and missed breakfast.

She scrambled into a gown and one sandal; the other one had vanished, and it took her several minutes to run it to ground behind the book-press. She was just fumbling with the straps when the bell went - definitely no breakfast, and only a minute or so to get down the stairs, across the courtyard, up the stairs of the Old Library and into the small lecture hall. She darted out and slammed the door behind her, realised she’d forgotten her wax tablets, went back for them, remembered to check for the stylus, found it wasn’t in the loop on the back of the tablets, hunted frantically for it, found it under the bed and this time made it down the stairs and into the yard, just in time to collide with the junior warden who was staggering along under a heaped armful of books, all of which inevitably ended up on the ground. Without daring to look him in the eye, she knelt down and started scooping them up and shovelling them back into his arms. When she’d gathered up the last errant scroll, she embarked on her apology, but the junior warden (who was eighty-two, as opposed to the senior warden, who was forty-one) scowled at her and said, ‘What?’ She decided to cut her losses and get out of the way as quickly as she could, before she did any more damage.

There wasn’t any point going to the lecture hall now; once the lecture started the door was bolted and nobody was allowed in. Nobody knew why this was done, though the favourite explanation was that, years ago, people who weren’t members of the Foundation used to sneak in once the lecture was under way and sit at the back, learning things they weren’t allowed to know. Machaera started to walk back to her staircase, her mind preoccupied with shame and guilt, and she nearly walked straight into the young woman who had already coughed and said, ‘Excuse me,’ at her. Fortunately, she avoided a second collision just in time.

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