by Kate Elliott
Yap and Goblin flattened their ears. The Runt tensed.
A man at the head of a cadre of soldiers waved them down. Papa brought the mules to a halt.
“Ver, greetings of the day,” Papa said politely.
The twelve soldiers were not from around River’s Bend. For one thing, they wore their long hair up in clubs behind their heads, as only soldiers, courtiers, judges, favored merchants, and the archon and his council were allowed to do in imitation of the men of the palace. They stared at Lifka and she stared right back until Papa nudged her with a foot.
The captain of the group caught the exchange. “Your slave has a belligerent look about her, ver.”
“She’s my daughter,” said Papa in the tone of a man who has spoken the words a thousand times.
“Your daughter? She can’t be your daughter,” said the captain in a mocking tone. Some of the soldiers laughed.
Papa kept talking in that even voice. “So unless there is some trouble, Captain, we’ll be getting on to our usual work of the day. We’re off to bring in wood for the charcoal pits.”
The man fingered the whip he carried. “By my authority as the king’s man, I am commandeering your wagon and your labor. We have a cargo for you to take.”
Yap rumbled, preface to an outright growl, but Papa rested a hand on the dog’s back to calm her. Goblin gave a single short bark to remind the men that he did not like the way they were looking at his people. The Runt was quivering, lips pulled back to display his impressive teeth. They weren’t big dogs but they knew how to fight.
“Good-looking dogs.” The captain gave a pointed glance to those of his men who carried crossbows. “I’d hate to see anything happen to them if they get too aggressive.”
Papa sighed in defeat. “What manner of cargo and what distance? We’re prepared only for a day’s work.”
“Just some rubbish to bury in the forest.”
The captain pointed with his elbow toward a midden over by the latrines. What looked at first like logs Lifka realized were corpses. “They’re starting to stink.”
Papa’s calm reply disguised the anger in his gaze. “There is a Sorrowing Tower in River’s Bend as in every town, where the dead are properly laid to rest in the eyes of the gods.”
“Once the shrine is finished the priests will close down your vulture tower. Anyway, the head priest has decreed that the dead bodies are defiled because they died on holy ground. They must be buried so their poison will not infest the god’s habitation.”
The droop of Papa’s eyelids gave him the expression of a man already in mourning. “The dead are meant to be laid out on Sorrowing Towers and their flesh scoured clean by the elements. To bury a corpse is an affront to the gods.”
“It is the law,” said the captain. “And I am telling you to do it.”
“Will we get payment for the work?” Papa asked in that slow way he had that made the question seem more like curiosity than demand.
The captain hesitated. Lifka had a feeling the man was wrestling with himself, as if he knew he could easily say no but felt it unfair.
“Ten vey for your trouble,” he said finally, “but no more, since you’re already going that way and can come back with a full wagon of firewood. If you’ve any to sell, we’re buying. Can’t seem to get these work gangs to cut enough for the barracks’ cook fires. Laziest asses I’ve ever supervised. And they keep having accidents.”
“They having trouble in the forest?” Papa’s gaze lifted toward the trees. Sunlight made the dense crowns shimmer as with the breath of a vast and mute beast tending its wounds.
The captain touched two fingers to his forehead. “Cursed nasty place, that forest. Ought to chop it all down, and maybe that’s what the priests mean to do.”
His men laughed uneasily.
Papa shook his head. “The Wild and its guardians are not to be trifled with. Nor is it proper to insult the seven gods, and the Four Mothers who gave birth to the land before the gods came, by even suggesting such an impious thing.”
“You can do as I ask, ver, or you can talk to an exalted priest and see if you wish to trifle with the shrine hierarchy.”
“As you say, Captain. I’ll do as you ask.”
Papa guided the mules toward the latrines, his lips moving in silent prayer: Be merciful to your children who are forced to walk into a place they know they ought not go.
He turned to her as they approached the corpses. “My apologies that you are forced to witness an offense against the gods, and that I cannot refuse to be party to it. May the gods be merciful to this spiritless flesh about to be handled with such disrespect.”
“It’s not your fault, Papa.”
She hated the lines that furrowed his brow, as if he thought he could put a stop to it. The five bodies were naked. Three had crusted and festering wounds. One had a cracked skull. The fifth had no mark beyond the hollow cheeks and bony limbs of a man worked in constant hunger.
“You take the feet, and I’ll take the hands,” Papa said.
She grabbed a pair of cold ankles. The skin was scaly dry and dappled with unsightly bruises. They quickly swung all five corpses into the back of the wagon as the dogs watched with puzzled interest. She could imagine the Runt trying to sort out the change of plan, for he sat there with head cocked to one side, one ear up and the other down. He was a dog who liked his routine: the ride, the chopping, the logs, the delivery, then home.
As they headed north along the cart track they passed a work gang shuffling past toward the building site. Most kept their eyes averted from the dead men but several stared angrily their way, as if she and Papa were somehow responsible! What were they to do? Refuse orders and be punished themselves? Be executed like Aunt Ediko when she protested the wrong thing at the wrong time?
She studied the living men’s gaunt bellies, haunted eyes, and disturbing silence. Laborers usually sang as they worked to make the time pass, but these men could just as well have had their tongues cut out. She looked back farther down the road in the hope of seeing her brothers and cousin but all she saw was a veiled priest standing at a gap in the walls that someday a gate would close. He was looking their way, holding a priest bowl. A finger of wind stroked her eyes as if a ghost sought a way in to discover the truths hidden in her heart. She scooted closer to her father.
“Lifka?”
“Nothing. Let’s sing.”
So they sang their favorite songs as the mules plodded along. Lifka accompanied the stories with the hand-talk that punctuated the words with extra meaning, but the lilting melodies fell like stones instead of leaping into the sky. Clouds covered the sun. Shadows clotted their path.
Once they were out of sight of the shrine, Papa turned the cart onto an overgrown wagon trail where years ago men had hauled out logs. Lifka said nothing, troubled by his grim expression.
“Hop off and make sure we’re hidden from the track,” he said.
She grabbed the Runt under an arm and with him holding himself rigid—for he hated the indignity of being carried—she scrambled off and set him down. As he snuffled through the brush, she tidied up broken branches as Papa drove on, out of sight. When she had concealed their passage to her satisfaction, she followed the wheel ruts into a spur of uncut forest where a copse of towering redheart stood like an outpost on the borderlands. Even the priests did not order the heartwood to be hewn down; axes could not cut into it.
“I will not bury any child of the Hundred,” Papa said as she walked up to him. “We’ll weave two ladders out of branches and call them Sorrowing Towers. This is as good a place as any, close to the redheart.”
“It will take half the day to weave funeral ladders, Papa. What about gathering and cutting wood? We need the coin, and besides that we need to replenish our own wood stores at home.”
He began trimming ash saplings for ladder legs. “We must do what is right for the dead, who cannot do for themselves.”
She nodded and set to cutting branches to make rungs,
the only sound the thunk of their tools. The dogs fanned out to sniff and scout.
“Papa, I know the Qin and Sirni outlanders brought their own ways and their own king with them, but why do Hundred folk like us turn their backs on the seven gods?”
His gentle frown made her uneasy. “Because they want the wealth and position the king and his court can offer them. I hear this isn’t the only place where they are building Beltak shrines. The temples to the seven gods were closed in the big cities years ago.”
A twig snapped. Yap and Goblin growled. The Runt came pelting out of the brush to take refuge at Lifka’s feet. Branches rustled noisily among the redheart. Papa set down his ax and nodded at Lifka to do the same.
He faced the trees and gestured greeting and peace in sign language. As he spoke with his lips he also spoke with his hands. “Cousins, we stand in peace. Forgive us if we walk where we are not allowed. This spiritless flesh we bring only to offer to the Four Mothers.”
Lifka was sure she saw people hidden in the shadows of the trees but she could not be sure. The guardians of the Wild killed anyone who crossed into their territory yet the priests of Beltak demanded more logs for their shrine, forcing people to push ever farther into the forest.
A shard of darkness slashed the air. A javelin thunked into the ground right between Lifka and her father, quivering from the force of the impact. A file of soldiers trotted into the clearing, the same group who had ordered them to dispose of the dead men. In their midst walked the veiled priest, most ominous of all because only the high exalted among the Beltak priests were allowed to conceal their faces as a sign of an exalted spiritual power mere mortals could not look upon.
From the priest’s belt hung a small wooden bowl. Its rim gleamed with such a sheen of despair that Lifka took a step away as he confronted her father. “You were commanded not to lay them out, for that blasphemy is forbidden to men who have died on holy ground.”
“All the land of the Hundred is holy ground.” Her father looked ready to spit. “We are enjoined to return our flesh to our ancient Mothers. Here in River’s Bend we follow the customs we have always followed. It is not forbidden to lay the dead on a Sorrowing Tower. Even if we must build a simple weaving of branches to serve the gods’ holy purpose.”
The priest’s gaze burned. “I arrest you on the charge of blasphemy. These soldiers will escort you to the assizes. The punishment for blasphemy is seven years’ service in a work gang so you may labor in the gods’ holy service and see the error of your rebellion.”
Yap and Goblin stared fixedly at the soldiers, shivering with unvoiced growls. Lifka tightened her hands on her staff, but her father gave all of them the gesture to stay. She was so angry she wanted to hit something. The breeze shifted. A rotten stench drifted out of the trees.
“Let’s get out of here,” said the priest with a nervous glance toward the redheart trees. “Come along, prisoner.”
“What of my daughter? What of my wagon and beasts?”
“A slave cannot be your daughter. Why is she not marked with ink as the law requires? Send her home with your wagon and beasts but I expect her to appear at the assizes tomorrow when you are sentenced so she can be properly marked.”
She was as tall as half of the men; she could fight with the staff as Mum had taught all the children, and thus give Papa time to run. But Papa again made the sign that she must stay quiet. In his eyes she saw his haunted memory of his sister Ediko’s horrible death. In his eyes she saw him wondering why the priest had followed them, how the man had known.
So she imagined herself a sapling, rooted to one spot. Papa whistled the dogs over to her. Then he walked away under guard. The soldiers at the rear measured her as the others strode out of sight. She tightened her hands on the staff to let them know they would not trouble her without an ugly fight. But there were five of them and only one of her. No man in the village would ever have assaulted her, but these were not village men, and the priest had just named her a slave. According to the law, slaves did not have the same rights as people.
Behind her came a rustle, a thump, and an ominous scrape. The soldiers looked toward the trees. Recoiling from a sight she could not see, the men thrashed away through the undergrowth after their comrades. Her back prickled as if a monster were breathing on her neck. But she did not move until the noise of the soldiers’ passage faded.
Then, almost weeping with fright, she turned to face whatever was behind her.
One of the dead men had been pulled by means of a leafy green rope up off the ground to dangle horribly by his feet from an overhanging branch. The body swayed, arms dangling, genitals exposed, a mockery of what he had once been. No one else was there, just the dead man hanging.
The forest people had hung up the corpse to warn away the soldiers.
Fear pulsed through her skin, wiping away all thought. Yet as she stared, the rope let out and the body was lowered to lie on the earth like the stroke of a broken letter.
Yap and Goblin stood, tails raised, ears high. The Runt subvocalized a tentative growl.
“I ask you with all respect, brothers and sisters, let me attend to the dead flesh of these people according to the will of the gods.” She spoke with her voice and her hands to the unseen watchers. To the gods. To herself. To Papa.
Oh gods. Papa.
But she knew what he would want her to do. So she set her staff aside and finished constructing the crude platforms. The bark rubbed at her hands. Her thoughts rubbed at her heart. Papa couldn’t possibly survive seven years in a work gang! How would Uncle react, considering how delicate his nerves already were? What would her brothers do? How would she tell her mother?
The trees swayed. She froze as three people emerged from them into the clearing. They were shorter than she was, with elongated arms and hairy bodies, but when she signed the hand gesture for peace and greetings they all three signed it back in the sign of the Hundred, which was also known as the speech of the Mothers.
Their eyes examined her silently. She smelled no threat; she tasted none. Yap and Goblin remained standing but they did not growl. The Runt hid behind her legs. So she kept on building.
One of the forest people ventured over to the wagon, sniffing cautiously at the beasts. The dun mule crooked one leg, threatening to kick. The other two forest people bent to the bier Papa had been forced to abandon. Lifka’s breathing quickened, but instead of ripping it apart they set to work. Their strong hands wove a platform from stiff branches far more quickly than she could. In an oddly companionable silence they worked until two platforms were finished and braced off the ground. With their aid, she slung the naked men onto the ramshackle Sorrowing Towers.
She chanted the death prayers over them, prayers she had last sung at her aunt’s passing. She wept, not for men she did not know but for the indignity of it. People were meant to be given to the Sorrowing Tower in dignity, wrapped in a light shroud, with a proper mourning procession and a feast afterward, not tossed into the woodland like rubbish or confined by the priests in their stone tombs and with their foreign rites.
When the last note faded and she looked around, the forest people had vanished. The dogs wagged their tails. The mules flicked their ears at flies.
She wanted to beat at the earth with her staff until everything broke. But she had to stay calm. In the end, she collected enough wood that Mother could afford to buy another week’s worth of rice. That’s what Papa would have her do because, he would patiently explain, they could do nothing until the morning so might as well not waste the day when it could be put to use.
When the wagon bed was filled, she lifted the dogs up onto the driver’s bench and turned the mules toward home. A shadow rippled over the path. The dogs cowered.
A huge eagle glided overhead, quartered back, then vanished over the trees.
Were the reeves scouting for people like her who were breaking the priests’ rules? Had Papa escaped and made a run for it?
But when she arrived home th
e worst had come true: The archon had sent word that Papa was to be condemned tomorrow. Uncle wept. Her sisters and brothers and cousins wept. Gray with shock, Mother trembled over their dinner of watery rice porridge and a few soggy dandelion leaves. Lifka felt too sick to eat.
What memories she had from her earliest childhood were nothing more than flashes: A plank floor that swayed beneath her as she played with a tinkling brass ball by rolling it as the floor tipped. A solemn space with a roof where people were singing while she wept; she had been so small she remembered only the emotion, but she could still hum the melody. Shivering on a steep trail as she looked down along a mountainside to see a line of people like ants on the march; some were frightened children like her and the rest were frightening soldiers.
She did not remember marching into the Hundred among that crowd of prisoners; nor had she any real memory of what she had left behind in the land from which she had been taken. She did not remember coming for the first time through the gates of their home although she had been told the story often enough, that Papa arrived home one late afternoon from a carting job and announced, “Look, I found our lost daughter,” and carried her in.
Thus had it been from that day on. She was Alon’s and Denas’s sister. She was cousin to Nanni, Ailia, Nonit, and Darit, never one word otherwise from the family or anyone who knew them.
So she made the only plan that would work.
She would offer herself for the work gang in Papa’s place.
15
In the first market town Dannarah and her reeves visited, on the southern edge of the Weldur Forest where the River Ili met the River Istri, they were told that no one made or sold redheart wreaths anymore because the Beltak priests had forbidden the practice as superstition. They flew north up the River Ili to a market village, friendly enough but cautious. The people in the tiny market were reluctant to speak to reeves until Reyad blithely lied and told folk he needed a wreath for his own upcoming wedding. An old woman charmed by his smile informed him that redheart was only harvested at the full moon and then only made to order; they would have to come back and, no, she’d sold no redheart wreaths last month at all because it was not the season for marrying, not in these parts anyway. They might have better luck at River’s Bend, she added; it was a large town at the meeting place of five trade roads.