Temple Alley Summer
Page 9
“I’ll go with him,” my brother muttered.
Coward. He feared the boat. I snickered.
My sister didn’t seem to care whether my brother or I went with her, so long as she would not be alone. She cried a bit and that was all.
“The boy will be stronger,” Father told the man and renegotiated.
Soon morning came. I walked the road to the boat. My brother and sister walked the road that led south, at the foot of the mountain. We all cried again a little. Just a little.
“It’s for the best,” Father said, stroking my sister’s hair. “You can eat to your heart’s content now.”
Father himself would eat well after this. I began to feel that I could handle anyplace, so long as it wasn’t home.
My brother may have been a coward, but he was no fool. The boat ride made me ill. With the contents of my stomach shifting up, then down—though I had hardly eaten anything—I vomited. I had never felt so wretched. I might not have much meat on my bones, but I had never been sick before.
We disembarked, and I rode from the boat to the capital, through the forest, on Father’s back. He worried, but not about me exactly. He worried that my pale face would make me hard to sell.
From Father’s back, I saw that the capital was surrounded by a stone wall. No matter how far I tilted my head back, I could not see the top of it. As we passed beneath an archway hewn from the stone, we nearly fell, toppled by pull carts and horse-drawn vehicles. For the first time ever, I saw a stone-paved road. It seemed the capital was surrounded by not one but several walls, including some that had windows. The windows indicated dwellings. Below them on the stone streets, horse carts rolled to and fro, mounted soldiers’ horses strutted, and peddlers with packs as tall as they were hurried to market squares along the way.
Against my father’s back, I peered about in a daze. I was no longer seasick; now I had so-many-people-I-can’t-believe-it sickness.
Father strode down a street and through a gate, and down another street and through another gate. The maze-like streets made the castle hard to reach in the event of an attack, I knew. Our path grew wide and then narrow. We would find ourselves in a square with a well at the center, and then see a steep sloping road or a narrow stairway. One square had a market inside. Vendors sold vegetables, game, furniture, farm tools, and clothing. The buyers wore finer clothes than I had seen in my entire life.
No matter how many gates we passed through, I still could not see the castle. I had heard that it was hidden among these walls. What would a castle look like, and what kind of people lived inside? I let my imagination wander but had no answers.
When Father finally put me down, the sun was high. We had reached a square in the heart of the capital that had a fountain in the middle instead of a well. Around the edges of this square, in place of vendors and their spread of wares, I saw stores lined up in arcades.
Around the fountain, several dozen parents with children to sell were trudging in a circle. The children were like me: skinny, with big eyes, and covered in filth. I slipped in line between a boy who looked younger and a girl who looked older and began to walk with my father. All of the parents had vacant faces, as if they were ready to hand off their children, and yet would never be ready.
Now and then a buyer stepped forward and pointed at a child. The parent would acquire a groveling expression and expound on how the child was strong and sharp.
The buyers wore well-made clothes, had full whiskers, and clutched pouches of money. And they wore shoes. Leather shoes that looked sturdy, with metal rivets.
Those of us who circled the fountain wore cloth shoes. Some had none.
Walking along, dragging our feet, we rounded the fountain countless times. The sun’s rays grew stronger, and my unfed body began to feel unsteady. Even so, the number of children had not decreased by half.
We’ll trudge around like this forever, I thought. The idea that we might go home did not even occur to me.
“That one.”
I heard a woman speak.
“Her name is Adi. She’s nine,” Father replied. “She’s slender but strong and has never had a cold. Tough as nails. She had a younger sister, so she can mind children. She knows her numbers.” Father clasped his hands at his chest and held forth.
Sweat ran into my eyes, preventing me from seeing the buyer. Father probably couldn’t see either; with the sun behind her, she appeared only as a silhouette. She seemed tall for a woman, and despite the summer heat, she wore a cloak.
“Show me her hands,” she said.
I stuck out both hands and heard a murmur of voices: “The woman’s a witch, you know. A witch.”
I felt large, icy hands grip my own. I pulled back, but the witch made no move to release me.
I had thought I would hardly care who bought me. I had ridden in a boat. I had seen the capital. I figured I could live through whatever came next. I had no dreams. No ambitions. Still, I had never imagined being bought by a witch. I knew there were witches in the world. I had heard they used magic. I also knew that most people feared them.
Now I grew afraid. For the first time, I saw what it meant to be sold to someone I had never met. Fear swallowed me like a wave.
“No! NOOO!”
I fought to free myself and sat down hard on the ground. The witch gripped my hands in one of hers, then reached into the pocket of the dress beneath her cloak. She withdrew a pouch and pushed it at Father.
I sobbed, but I didn’t ask Father to help me.
With her free hand, the witch pushed me inside her cloak. It was pitch dark; I could see nothing. Having cried so hard, I couldn’t catch my breath. I lost consciousness for the first time ever.
The witch held me to her side and straddled a broom. We soared through the sky. I opened my eyes only once as we flew, and from a gap in the cloak, I glimpsed the capital’s walls. We flew away from the capital, toward the middle of a lake that sat in the opposite direction from the river. A mansion appeared at the edge of the lake, positioned like a lookout. Around the mansion, hundreds of water birds circled as if to protect it, crying gyaa-gyaa. The witch’s broom headed straight through the middle of the birds. The speed, and the odd feeling that my stomach had turned upside down—a different sensation entirely from the boat—left me unconscious again.
When I awoke, I found myself on a bed in a small room. All was quiet. I could not even hear the raucous cries of the birds anymore. The bed was the only furniture. There was no door in the room’s entrance.
The witch spoke. “When you’re awake, please come out.”
What would happen to me? Was she planning to eat me?!
I slid from the bed, and my bare feet landed on a stone floor polished as carefully as a mirror. My ripped, soiled shoes had vanished.
The room’s doorway led to a larger room like a hall. Each of its four corners had a wood burning stove. The stoves were lit. Was it night? The heat of noontime seemed a dream now. My skin felt cool. The flames in the stoves rose tall. The hall had only the four stoves inside—nothing more. To the left stood another doorway with no door in it. The opening revealed darkness. It was indeed night.
“Adi. That’s your name, right? I am Stonebird.”
I didn’t see the witch, but I could hear her speak through the sculpted birds on top of each of the four stoves. The four stone birds were carved with long wings that protected each stove as if it held an egg. The birds had long necks, and their heads all tilted to the same side. Their eyes were open. The witch’s voice seemed to come first from one corner and then from another: the right rear bird, then the left front bird.
The hall spooked me. I began to edge toward the exit.
“You can’t escape,” said the voice from the right rear bird. The eyes of all four birds, eight eyes total, bore into me. My feet stopped as if glued to the floor.
“You have black fingernails, I see,” the front right bird said.
“I wonder why?” the right rear bird asked.
“It’s from digging in the mud,” I explained.
“Why would you do such a thing?”
I bit my lip. I didn’t think of my fingernails as dirty, but I did not want others knowing the details of why my family dug through mud.
Past the cedar grove behind my childhood home, if you climbed through a patch of boulders, you would find a valley of trees with purple flowers that gave off a strong, sweet scent. Hot mud bubbled in that valley. If you breathed its steam for too long, you would get a headache. In the season when the flowers bloomed, people said that their scent mixed with the mud’s steam would drive a person mad. I didn’t mind the smell of the flowers on its own.
The valley was a burial site. Long ago, before the current royal family assumed power, the capital city stood at the foot of our mountain. The old capital is now a barren field, without even a single blade of grass. My ancestors served its rulers as grave minders. When those rulers died, we no longer had official duties, but our family continued to live by the burial site. We tilled a small field and hunted game from the mountain to eat. This proved far from enough to feed us all. The reason we had survived so long was the mud. The mud in the valley decomposed the buried bodies, but it had no effect on metal. We lived by robbing the graves.
Whenever it rained, we would go into the valley. We would pray to its spirit, ask forgiveness, and then burrow into the hot, supple mud headfirst. We would paddle through searching for rings, bracelets, necklaces, and money pouches bound to the dead. We could see the shine of gold and gemstones through the mud. I had thought that everyone could see that.
Even our backwoods mountain had two or three settlements on it. But my family never talked with the people who lived there. We were outcasts. The village children even threw stones at me. My mother had married Father after he tricked her; after the birth of my younger sister, she left us and ran away. The mother of my two older half-sisters may have been tricked too, but she had died.
I had thought that everyone despised my family because we robbed graves. But that wasn’t the only reason. I later learned that we were descended from a union between a human and a ghost. I wondered how that made us different from other people, exactly.
In recent years, no matter how much we searched the mud, we had found nothing. Our family must have retrieved all the precious items from the swamp over time. For several years, Father had given up searching altogether.
“Why did you dig in the mud?” Stonebird asked me now, determined to know more.
“To find gold,” I muttered.
“As I thought. Can you swim?”
I shook my head. I had burrowed into the mud headfirst, but at its deepest it came to my chest. I had never had to swim. The current in the river near our house had run too swiftly for swimming. Even my brother had never swum.
“I’ll need you to swim,” Stonebird said. She stood before me now.
I looked at her face for the first time. She had hard eyes; the irises shone a pale blue. Her long, silver, unkempt hair glinted like gold in the light. She seemed younger than the mother I vaguely remembered. Stonebird’s lips were not painted, but nonetheless bright red. She wore a billowing black dress with long sleeves, despite the summer heat.
“Come.” She took my hand and made for the exit.
We walked onto a terrace covered in bird droppings. The loud water birds must be asleep somewhere, I thought. Their still-soft droppings squished beneath my feet. As I frowned at the sensation, something covered my face. Stonebird was removing my dress of hempen cloth. No sooner had she stripped me to my underwear than she flung me from the terrace into the lake. A good distance separated the terrace and the water. For a moment, though I knew I was falling, I saw a glow and realized it came from the lights of the capital. Then, plunged into pitch-black water, I began to drown. Stonebird flew down on her broom and pulled me out.
I quickly learned to swim after that. Every day, Stonebird flung me into the lake. When I would drink water, choke, and begin to drown, she would fly down on her broom and retrieve me. My wet, bare feet soon wore a path across the filthy terrace as I trudged back to the mansion. Stonebird watched me from the terrace each day as I sputtered, so the birds no longer lit there.
Though it was summer, my body grew cold from being in the water first thing every morning. I would warm up in front of the stoves. One of them was always heating a pot of stew, bubbling with meat and vegetables. Did Stonebird cook? I never saw her prepare anything, but the stew was delicious. Every day, it appeared at a different stove, and it tasted different too.
Around the time I began to swim for real, I grew taller and started to fill out. As my father had promised, I was finally well fed.
Once I could swim, I easily learned to dive. The lake did not seem to have clear places; wherever I dove, the water was cloudy. The murk billowed up from the lake bed, spiraling with increasing force to the surface.
One day, Stonebird threw a golden goblet from the terrace. I found it and brought it up. She threw in a gold ring. I counted to twenty before diving but still found it. She threw in a small, transparent stone. I knew it was a diamond; besides gold, I had found jewels in the mud of the valley. When we found a diamond, however small, our whole family had eaten for six months. I counted to fifty before diving for this one. The dark lake bed oozed a murky sludge. Through it, I spotted the diamond.
“Just as I thought,” Stonebird said with a satisfied nod.
“There’s something I want you to search for, starting tomorrow.”
It went without saying that I would search the bottom of the lake.
“There’s a pearl,” she said.
I knew what a pearl was. There had been pearls in the valley too.
“You found a diamond,” Stonebird said. “You can definitely find the pearl.”
I guessed the pearl would be about as big as the diamond Stonebird had tossed in the lake, which was the size of the tip of my thumb.
But Stonebird made a circle with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands, using them to frame the moon that rose over the terrace. “It should be about this size,” she told me.
The moon that night was full and appeared large. It fit exactly inside the circle Stonebird had formed with her fingers. So, the pearl was that big. Well, I thought, large objects are easier to find than small ones.
Once I learned to swim, I found my new life simple. The water was cold, but Stonebird’s stew put lots of padding on my body.
I had only to dive for the pearl. I had no worries. I had confidence that I would find it one day. Finding it became my goal as well as Stonebird’s. I wished to know why she wanted the pearl, but I soon forgot about that. Every day I dove until I was exhausted, wolfed down my stew, and slept like the mud itself.
The water grew colder and stung my body, and the number of snowy days increased. Still, I dove every day. On particularly cold days, Stonebird would pull me from the water early.
When that happened and I had energy to spare, it took time to fall asleep. On the nights when I lay awake, I mulled over Stonebird and her home.
Stonebird’s mansion, which I could see when floating in the lake, was large. The small room where I slept and the hall with the stoves, and the terrace to which it led, made up the north part. That was the only part of the house that I had explored, but it was less than half. The entire mansion had sheer walls that rose straight up from the ground, with no stairways leading to them. Stonebird must always come and go by broom, I thought. No one who approached by boat would be able to enter. Since I had come here, I had not sensed another person’s presence. Then again, if someone had come at night, I might not have known.
Apparently, Stonebird lived in the side of the house opposite mine. It had a larger terrace. What was the south side like? I wondered. I wanted to take a
look.
Stonebird believed that I would find the pearl, so though she did not treat me well exactly, neither did she push me too far or too roughly. I had been with her for six months. She didn’t pay me close attention, just as she rarely noticed the birds who circled overhead. But she noticed whether I stayed healthy enough to use my arms and legs to seek the pearl. Apparently, she saw me as a valuable tool. When she pulled me from the water onto her broom, she would simply ask, “Warm now?” and say nothing further. I, for my part, only nodded. Aside from the way she flew on a broom, Stonebird sometimes seemed just like a normal human.
Snow had been falling since the day before. By late afternoon, I could not see even a short distance through the snow. The lake began to freeze.
The next morning, when I stepped onto the terrace, the blizzard—far from stopping—had grown denser. Still, Stonebird stood with her broom waiting for me. I assumed that today, like every day, I would dive.
But that was not the case. “Today you will rest,” Stonebird told me. “This blizzard shows no signs of letting up. And today is New Year’s Eve.”
She placed a small, hard object in my palm and closed my fingers around it. Then she mounted her broom and took off from the terrace. I thought she might head to the terrace on the opposite side of the house, as usual, but today she flew in a different direction, and I soon lost sight of her. When she didn’t reappear, I understood that she must have gone somewhere and would be out for a good while.
The hall was almost hot inside. The object Stonebird had given me stuck to my now-sweaty hand. When I sniffed it, it smelled like ripe fruit. Evidently, it was food. When I licked it, it tasted sweet. I had never encountered sugar before. Today was New Year’s Eve, and Stonebird had given me a gift, so New Year’s Eve must be special, I thought. Back home, we had done nothing more than sweep our entrance clean for the New Year, which seemed just like any other day. Where had Stonebird gone? I had heard that in the capital, people stayed awake all night to welcome the New Year. I wondered if that was what she planned to do.