Tributary
The Riverbed, Book Two
Vivien Leanne Saunders
‘Tributary’ and ‘The Riverbed’ Series are Copyright © 2019 by Vivien Leanne Saunders. All Rights Reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Cover design and Illustrations by Vivien Leanne Saunders
Source images all public domain from Unsplash
Proofed and Edited by Vivien Leanne Saunders, George Glass and Jane Martin
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Vivien Leanne Saunders
Visit my website at https://sivvusleanne.wixsite.com/authorvls
Printed by KDP Direct
First Printing: 2019
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For Kitty
The memories of me
will seem more like bad dreams
Just a series of blurs
Like I never occurred
and someday, you will be loved
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
CHAPTER 1
I was thirteen when the snake bit me. Sometimes I wake up and realise that I cannot remember a time when I had two hands. Before the snake there was a child who was frightened to walk into the woods, and afterwards there was a woman called Harriet.
For the first few months I thought I could still become a Siren. My wound healed surprisingly quickly – cauterised by the bitch Dahra, who smiled as she did it – and the dark marks the venom laced through my skin faded away. I was still as clever and sweet as they had trained me to be. I could sing and memorise whole strings of poetry. I had simply mislaid one hand. What of it? A girl could do a lot with one hand.
Nobody visited me from the apprentice wing. After weeks of loneliness I knew for sure that I wasn’t going back. My Mistress, Tarin, had given me up. I was not even allowed to write to her. The old women said that I would just upset her if I begged to go back to school. I hadn’t even thought about begging, I just wanted to tell her that I missed her.
My new Mistress was called Helen. She was as soft as a curl of butter, and her eyes were the same muddy green shade as my own. She told me to call her mother, and for a moment I truly believed that she had given me life. I stared at her wizened peach-fur face and pale whiskers, and willed my face not to show any emotion. Helen tutted and pinched my cheek.
“It’s an honorific, girl.” Seeing my relief, she laughed and hugged me. “Ah, you poor little thing. You’ve gone from being owned to being wanted! Forget about your Mistresses and rules. We’re your family, now.”
I stood stiffly, waiting for her to let me go. I could feel her heart beating against mine. It thudded where my own fluttered. I did not want a family; I wanted my life back. A week ago I was standing beside twenty other girls in the dappled woods, learning how to enchant the senses. Now I was being manhandled by an old woman who smelled of milk and sour pickles.
I didn’t sleep that night. I am not given to sulking. I could only stomach a few hours of my own company before I was desperate for someone to talk to. Although the servants lived in the shadow of the mountain I could see pink light trickling over the ground, and I heard the bells summoning everyone to breakfast. If I waited for another hour mother would bring me a tray, as she had for the weeks when my fever raged, but I was done feeling sorry for myself.
The dining hall was far larger than the one in the apprentice wing – hardly surprising, since there were a hundred servants for every ten Siren. The furniture was made of solid wood and everything was comfortingly old, even down to the soft lines the benches had worn into the stone floor. There was nothing delicate or beautiful in sight. Even the crockery was made of wood. Everyone scraped their plates clean, without fear of breaking expensive china. And the food! Every table had something greasy, fried or sweet on it. Nobody scolded their tablemates for taking a second helping or speaking with their mouth full. I was astonished.
There were as many girls my age as there had been in the apprentice wing. They beckoned me to sit at their table. I saw harelips and moles, birthmarks and sloping shoulders. Some girls had uneven teeth or thin hair. It did not take me long to work out that these were my sisters, raised in the lighthouse and then sent here instead of to the school. My stomach felt a little odd. I had believed that a Siren’s child was always as perfect as she was.
I pitied these girls. They had been sentenced to this life because of their ugliness – something none of them had any control over. At least I had a reason to be here. If I had been a little bolder as I picked up the snake, or if Dahra had chosen another girl, I would still be an apprentice. That fact had been spinning around in my head until I wanted to scream. But that morning, as I spread butter onto a bread roll, I felt as if I had been lucky. How awful would it have been if my own birth had cast me down?
The girls wanted to know my name, and my age, and – of course – what had happened to my hand. I was reserved at first, and they told each other that I was shy. That was when I realized none of them were holding anything back. They did not pretend to be nice, like my friends in the school. They had no reason to be competitive. While the apprentices had to be better than each other to become Siren, the servants could choose any path they wished. If a girl wanted to become a hairdresser, or a stone mason, she only had to tell her mother and she would be given all the help she needed. I did not know what I wanted to be. Mother Helen told me that I did not have to rush. The old women knew that it would take me time to accept my new status.
The children had their own squabbles, of course, and so did the adults. Their arguments were about real things. They fought over insults and rumours, over portion sizes and unfair working hours. They fought about the things they could change, and were disgusted by the mistresses who tried to lord it over them. If any of the servants had pretended that they were superior, then they would have been laughed at.
A constant stream of women joined their ranks. There were retired Siren and failed apprentices, the stupid, the ugly, and the uninspired. One day, I saw a girl from my class. Violet’s skin was waxen and her eyes had sunken into her face. A mistress was leading her into the healing wing. I peered through the window and was surprised to see many of my old friends. They were so sallow and thin that I barely recognised them.
“Dahra poisoned them.” one of the other servants whispered, tugging me away from the window, “It happens every year. Last year there were so many that we ran out of beds!”
My mouth hung open. I remembered the smile on Dahra’s face as she had raised her saw over my wrist. Yes, I could believe that she had poisoned half of her students. She was probably annoyed that the other half had survived! A shiver of fear ran through me at the thought of her coming to the servant’s village to finish the job. “Why would she do that?”
The girl looked at me for a while, and then took me aside. She led me to the kitchens and pressed a cup of hot, sweetened milk into my hands. As I drank it, she whispered in my ear. In a few, simple words I learned what the Siren truly were.
I finished my milk, and looked down into the dregs as if I expected to see dark oil floating in the thick honey. “Oh.” I said, for it was going to be either that word or a burst of hysterical laughter. The other girl squeezed my arm.
“I didn’t believe it when they told me. I spent the longest time thinking my mother was teasing me. One day I sneaked through the
tunnels to the pier, and I watched one of the skinny pale witches feeding sweet cakes to a man. He only ate two bites before he choked, and when she took the rest of the cake out of his mouth it was all red with blood.”
I did not bother to hide my shudder, “Am I allowed to know?”
“Who would you tell? The only people who don’t know are the apprentices, and they wouldn’t talk to us if we paid them!”
For some reason, that comment upset me more than the secret I had been told. When the poisoned girls finally ventured out of their beds I looked into their faces and knew that, without my mutilated arm, they would not have recognised me. Now that our smart dresses and precious ointments had been taken away we were nothing.
I felt my hand’s ghost each morning when I woke up and tried to brush my hair out of my eyes. Mother Helen gave me allium for the dull pain. She tried to hide a few drops of vervain in the tonic, but it made the liquid turn pink. I recognised the smell. The essence was used to treat anger, as if my lot in life would be improved by being too doped to hate it. Who knew what else had been hidden in the medicine?
“I don’t want it.” I spat, handing the steaming cup back to Mother.
“Dahra said you have to drink it.”
“I don’t have to do what she says.”
She tapped her fingers against the side of the cup. If she had ordered me to drink then I would have, but it wasn’t in Mother Helen to be strict. She took the potion away. By noon I was sobbing with pain. I could not look at my wrist without feeling sharp steel slicing through the scars. At lunch my sisters surrounded me in a loving crowd, kissed me, and sent someone running to the healing wing. They came back with the same cup of tonic, a dose of opium, and strict orders that I was to swallow both or neither.
After another month the odd tingle faded. I did not need to drink the tonic. Dahra started mixing her pink herbs into the medicine I took for my migraines. I exhausted myself trying to fight her, and finally gave up. It was easier to accept Dahra’s peculiar apology than it was to rouse her anger. I grew used to the soft, sweet moods that the drug gave me.
I learned submission, then. What else?
There were long halls filled with steaming vats. We melted down beeswax, aloe and coconut oil, and mixed them with sweet perfumes. This made the lotions the Siren massaged into the men’s hairy legs. We mixed the leftover dregs with lard and charcoal to make soap for the apprentices. We made so much makeup, lip balm and lubricant that we filled entire storerooms with iridescent, milky vials. Some of the servants learned how to work glass, so that they could make more tiny bottles for us to fill. Finally, we made potions that the apprentices were too stuck-up to make: disinfectants, fungal rinses and medicines to cure intimate sores. None of the Siren wanted to admit that those diseases existed, much less make the cures for herself.
It was hot, sticky work. We spent endless hours sweating over steaming vats, and if we made a single mistake a whole day’s work could come to nothing. Our eyes burned and our necks ached, but as we grew older we became used to the hard work. We could not take the same pride in our potion making as the Siren did when they made their honey liquors, but I was satisfied with my small skill.
Mistress Dahra sometimes visited the older women. I hid behind the vats and listened in on her lessons. She helped them to make the darkest drugs of all. I crept into the storage room after she was gone and read the curling script on the labels. Fever. Delirium. Miscarriage. Infertility. The sight enthralled me. There was true witchery in trapping living horrors inside pretty glass bottles. I couldn’t resist reaching up and touching the vials. I expected them to feel warm, as if I was touching suffering flesh, but they were icy cold.
None of us were allowed to work for more than three days in the potion workshops. The fumes were toxic, even when we breathed through silk masks. For the rest of the week we turned our hands to other tasks.
It was obvious that I could not work as a smith or a glass blower. I was good at decorating cakes, but other cooking eluded me. When I was told to cook the children’s porridge I always seemed to burn it. Mother Nara told me that I cared about it too much. If I relaxed and let the food cook naturally, then it would be fine. I fussed over it and added too much heat, and so the food never had a chance to cook before it started to sear.
One day I took the knives outside to sharpen them, and saw myself fifty years from now, still struggling to make porridge and still sharpening endless knives into easily blunted points. I did not want my life to ebb away like that. Rage reared up in my stomach. Sobbing, I hurled the knife to the ground. It stayed there with the point embedded in the centre of a circle of daisies. I wanted to see the world outside of the village, and be a part of the life I had trained for all of my life.
That was the day when I decided to become a maid. I was slow, and made mistakes, but my skill at decorating made my mothers smile. It turned out that decorating a Siren’s face was not much more difficult than painting buttercups onto an iced cake.
I started by working in the bath house. I repaired Sirens’ makeup after the steam had made it melt... or after it had been smeared by eager kisses and greedy hands. The sure knowledge of what was going on around me made me blush. The bathhouse maids slept in small rooms below the roof, and at night we spied on the Siren through the floorboards and pretended that it was funny, not thrilling, when we saw them making love.
I saw women that I had grown up with. I barely knew any of them. Mistress Clarice still painted her eyes with oddly round lines, and Mistress Amanda had a red gap in her foundation where she still absentmindedly rubbed her forehead. The others could have been strangers. I could have recognised my servant sisters with sacks over their heads. We, at least, did not have to playact to earn our supper.
Our lives were saturated with honesty. We grounded ourselves, growing strong roots so that we could withstand the fluttering lies that the Siren spun around us. When we were in our own quarters we gossiped as the Siren were forbidden to do, and fought with one another, and made enemies as well as friends. We were allowed to be taciturn. If we wanted to scratch our pimples or climb trees, nobody cared.
Every servant on the island devoted herself to making two hundred women look like goddesses. We had to clean up all of the spilled powders and crumpled clothes. We scurried through our tunnels like insects, only showing ourselves when it was absolutely necessary. We scrubbed the pier on our hands and knees every night and burned our fingers changing wicks the second the lamps dried up.
The Siren barely noticed us. We said that we hated them, but it was difficult not to claim some part of their splendour. If someone wore a particularly fine dress, then her seamstress were sure to boast about it. A man who indulged himself on sweet pastries would have a very proud cook refilling his plate. We remembered each other’s victories. We even gambled with each other over our favourites. Such-and-such would never break a man in fewer than three days! So-and-so would not volunteer her frigid body for anything less than a captain!
That was how I came to know Mistress Clay. I had known her as a child, but she had been shy and surly, and I had other friends who I preferred to spend time with. I had not been paired with her in any of our games, and we had never sat beside each other at supper. I suppose it sounds callous to have grown up with someone and still barely know them, but the apprentices were never encouraged to make friends. We knew that we were competing with each other. If you were lucky enough to be beneath someone’s notice then it was one less rival to worry about. Clay never threatened anyone. Everyone was amazed when she became a success.
The Siren blended into each other. They adopted names and abandoned them, like flowers turning into shimmering seeds. Clay was as changeable as the rest, but there was always something about her that remained the same. She was aloof with the men and supercilious with the servants. She had a cold way of speaking to people, as if she was too far above them to look them in the eye.
When Mistress Clay walked her eyes were always f
ixed on the horizon. Perhaps she wanted the Mainland to call her home, to whatever river she claimed had spat her out. To me, it looked as if she had forgotten something. Her mind looked like it was full of questions. They sometimes overflowed into snide comments and bitter tirades, but we all knew that if we kept our distance she would forget who she had been angry at soon enough.
We laughed over the idiotic things she said to make her men confide in her. We found it hilarious to watch arrogant women demeaning themselves just to get a pickpocket to tell them where he hid his mother’s tin jewellery. Clay slapped her maids whenever she caught them spying. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought she was ashamed. But – no. She had learned spitefulness from her Mistress – the same thin-faced shrew who haunted my nightmares with a burning knife. It did not surprise me that Dahra’s apprentice would be a bitch, too.
Then a murderer would come to the island, or a man whose trapped hostages were still alive. Other women balked at the thought of having so much to lose, but to Clay it was all the same. On those days her arrogance was warranted. Even the people who despised her respected the way she twisted the truth out of their closed lips.
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