Our Lady of the Islands

by Shannon Page

  Sian accepted his gift. “You are far too generous, I fear. Will you be safe here now?”

  “Having been careful to play the fool here for so long, I am unlikely to be credited with sufficient cleverness to be blamed for anything beyond stupidity in this affair.” He gave her the ghost of a smile. “Now, listen carefully. The route is simple, really. Just a couple of turns. Have you an agile memory, or should I write them down?”

  Sian woke with a groan to find morning arrived. The bed of surf-worn stones and pebbles on which she lay made her moldy straw mattress in the temple’s dungeon seem luxurious by comparison. She turned stiffly to peer out from beneath the skiff under which she had taken shelter the night before. Up and down Pembo’s Beach she saw others emerging from abandoned hulls much like her own, or from shelters fashioned out of cast-off cargo containers, or just haphazard piles of flotsam. Here and there morning fires had been lit, and cooking pots set to boil above them. These were the kind of people the Butchered God’s priest seemed to favor. The god’s body had washed up here, after all. If she could gain their trust, perhaps they would help her finally find the priest. He seemed more than ever her only hope now.

  Sian had passed this unsightly shantytown — no more, really, than a vast graveyard for abandoned craft and other refuse from Cutter’s nearby commercial port — any number of times while going about her business for Monde & Kattë, or for the occasional shipboard meeting or more private rendezvous with Reikos. Never could she have imagined that she would find herself living here among Alizar’s poorest and most dispossessed. With another groan, she rolled onto her back again to stare at the overturned hull above her.

  As Het had promised, her route through the temple’s abandoned service tunnels had been simple, and the little light had lasted long enough to see her to a long-eroded doorway — more a cave mouth now — beneath a rugged cliffside on an abandoned beach somewhere on The Well’s west shore. She had left Het’s coarse robe inside the tunnel mouth for fear the streets might already be filled with temple guards looking for a false monk. Then, rejecting travel by runner-cart as both too expensive and too dangerous, she had begun to make her stealthy way across The Well.

  Keeping to the darkest, least populated streets and paths, she had struggled in vain to think of any plan or destination that made sense. The townhouse was out of the question, of course. She had not dared go back to Arouf or Maleen. If Het’s warning were true — and she had no cause to doubt him — the Mishrah-Khote might already be lying in wait for her at either of those places. They had certainly found her the first time quickly enough. And even if they weren’t waiting, and her family could be made to take her fears seriously now, how much might they be endangered by her mere presence? The thought of Arouf, much less her daughter, wasting in a temple prison cell because of her was more than Sian could bear.

  She had briefly considered asking Reikos to take her to her younger daughter on the continent. Had he not half begged her to go with him when he sailed? Even if he hadn’t been entirely serious, he would probably not say no … But, she did not really trust him. Not now, not after his … mercenary reaction to her troubles. And recalling Maleen’s reaction to her plight mere days ago, Sian had no sure idea what reception she might get from Rubya either. If Rubya proved unprepared to take her in, Sian would just be left penniless in some foreign land to be … what, exactly? Not a captain’s wife, surely. Reikos was not the marrying kind — even if she could imagine wanting that from him now. In any case, if her new healing powers followed her from Alizar, her troubles would surely follow as well. No. Leaving Alizar made no more sense than staying did.

  More ravenous than ever, it had seemed, Sian had finished the last of Het’s bagged meal before she’d even reached the long bridge back to Cutter’s, and could easily have eaten six more like it in a blink. She’d made her way across the island yearning for the bouillabaisse served by the Eighth Sea, though there was no question of showing herself at any such place now, even if she’d possessed the money anymore to pay for such luxuries.

  Upon reaching the eastern end of the island at gods knew what hour of the night, exhausted and weak with hunger, she had found herself heading, perhaps by force of habit, toward the docks where Reikos doubtless dreamed peacefully in his narrow shipboard bunk. Looking down from the harbor road at the beachside shantytown she’d passed so many times without concern, she had realized that this, at least, was nowhere the Mishrah-Khote or anyone else would think to look for Sian Kattë. Her pride had been no match by then for her fatigue or her despair. It had not taken long to find an overturned hull under which nobody else already lay. It had taken even less time to fall fast asleep.

  Now even sleep had left her, with nothing but the few coins Het had given her and the ragged, badly soiled clothes she wore. In all likelihood, she was the poorest person on this miserable beach. They, at least, had knowledge she lacked of how one navigated such a life.

  As so often seemed the case these days, it was hunger that impelled her forward. Het’s largess would be at least sufficient to buy her a chicken at the harbor market. She supposed someone here would lend her a flaming twig with which to light a driftwood fire of her own to cook it on. There. A plan at last.

  Gathering her resolve, Sian crawled out from underneath her rotting hull, adjusted her rumpled veil, and stood to stretch her stone-ground muscles in the early light. Her emergence startled a flock of sandpipers, who started weet-weeting at her in alarm as they fled down the beach. Several of the shantytown’s human denizens looked up at the disturbance, then glared at her suspiciously. She summoned a small smile and waved at one of them, a gaunt-looking woman half her age with a ragged child of uncertain gender clinging to her knees. The woman turned away as if Sian’s wave had rendered her invisible. But the child continued staring, its dark eyes like two holes burned through a dirty blanket, framed in a raven’s nest of tangled, coal-black hair. Flinching from the accusation in those eyes, Sian wished suddenly to look away, just as the child’s mother had, but found herself unable to disengage. My mother is a woman too, the child’s smoldering gaze seemed to say. Raising a child just like your own. But here, beneath a pile of wreckage. Without hope of ever —

  Sian wrenched her gaze away, breathless with the effort it had taken to break whatever power inhabited those dreadful eyes. She turned, unsteadily, to head for the market, feeling the child’s stare still fastened on her back, though she dared not even glance over her shoulder to see, for fear of being recaptured. The power that child’s eyes possessed … had seemed unnatural. Or, she thought with a sudden shiver, had some power possessed the child?

  The memory of Het’s voice came unbidden to her mind: … that such a power could have come from anywhere except the gods …

  It wasn’t a new idea, of course. What she could do now with her hands was certainly miraculous. Yet not until this moment had the implications truly reached through her cloud of dismay and confusion. She had just gone on thinking of her new power as something done to her by a crazy, would-be priest — imagining she had the power, or the right, to make him, or the Mishrah-Khote perhaps, take it from her again. But if this power had actually been given by a god … to her specifically, for some unimaginable reason …

  She shook her head in stunned denial as she pushed through the dense scrub palm and thorny vine which lay between the shantytown and the harbor road, reconsidering the child’s disturbing power to immobilize her with its gaze. The accusation in its eyes. Were others on the islands being seized and used by this so-called Butchered God as well? Did it peer out at Alizar from all sorts of little portals, working its will through whatever tools were handy at the moment? Had Sian any power left at all to make plans of her own? Or would this god steer her as it wished now, regardless of her own intentions? Might the eyes or tongue of any stray bystander be commandeered to reproach her if she began to drift off whatever course it willed for her? Had it just done so through that strange, unnatural child?


  And what course did it will for her, anyway? Why choose her rather than some more significant member of the ruling family? What was this message she’d been so roughly conscripted to carry to them? She still had no idea — and this god, if god it was, was taking no pains she could see to help her deliver it. Had she been transformed like this to heal the Factor’s child? Or was there some greater concern at stake here; something that only a god might have sufficient vision to foresee?

  None of these were questions she had any wish to ask, much less be used to answer. Yet now that this unnerving child — or whatever had made use of it — had uncorked their bottle, more such questions just kept pouring out inside her.

  What could a dead god want anyway, of anyone, much less of her? Was all this really being driven by the god whose body had washed up here two years ago, as the priest who had inflicted this gift of hers obviously believed? Or might some other god simply have elected to work through the dead one’s shadow? Perhaps its killer? What besides a god could kill another god?

  Such maddening questions!

  Finding her hands pressed to the sides of her head as she walked up the narrow lane, she quickly let them drop. She must be as invisible as possible now. Just one more of Alizar’s teeming, irrelevant poor.

  The possibility that she really might have been chosen for this fate by some deity did nothing at all to make her a more willing vessel. More desperate than ever for some path toward escape, she finally conceded that, after she’d obtained some food, there was no option but to swallow her pride and turn to Reikos. He could help access her money somehow, or convey messages, or run necessary errands for her with at least as much safety as anyone else now. And he could get her off the islands altogether, if it really came to that. Might whatever god had seized her be outdistanced after all? She had heard stories of the continent’s more active gods and godlings all her life, yet, to her knowledge, none of them had ever shown up here in Alizar. Might gods be as regionally bound as people were? Perhaps her unwanted power would vanish too, if she could cross beyond the borders of this new god’s influence. And even if her power remained, she might still find refuge where no healing priesthood felt threatened by her. Might she not be able to do some good with such a power, if she were allowed to — even make a living with it?

  Ugh! Now I sound just like Reikos.

  Her stomach rumbled fiercely, bringing her back to ground. All she needed to be thinking of right now was a chicken. And a messenger, perhaps. Yes. The port market would be full of messengers to hire for just a few of her precious coins, and without attracting any notice at all amidst the usual hubbub there.

  She began mentally composing a carefully phrased invitation to Reikos. One that he would understand without leaving anybody else, including her messenger, means to deduce her current whereabouts, or the location of their intended rendezvous. They would have to meet on some other island, of course, so that if her missive fell into the wrong hands it would not lead anyone back to her new home in the harbor shantytown. Fortunately, her long history of clandestine communications with the captain had provided her a well-established code in which to frame such instructions.

  As the busy harbor market came into view ahead of her, however, Sian could not help but imagine being waylaid and captured yet again. Recalling Het’s suggestion that her power might be used to harm as well as heal, Sian recoiled again from the idea. She doubted any god who wanted her to heal would have given her power to hurt instead. And she wanted no such power anyway. The idea sickened her. This so-called gift had reduced her to many things, but she had no intention of allowing it to make a thug of her as well. She was alert to the full danger of her situation now. If her best precautions proved insufficient, she would not be passively cooperative again. This time, at the slightest sign of trouble, she would flee for her life.

  As the market’s babble and activity engulfed her, Sian felt increasingly safer. Few people took any notice of another spent woman in rags, as Sian wandered through the press of haggling customers, vendors crying out their wares, and palm-thatched, bamboo food carts with their fragrant, smoky fires. The few who seemed to see her at all offered no more than frowns of distaste before looking away again. Once she might have been offended or ashamed, but now, she was simply reassured. It took her very little time to find her messenger; a boy of perhaps twelve or thirteen summers — clearly new at his profession — who looked far too innocent and eager to be in league with anyone. He had the usual writing implements and paper which they all carried to accommodate the unprepared. In keeping with her appearance, she pretended to be illiterate, dictating her message for Reikos as the boy wrote it out for her.

  “You won’t forget what I have tell you, or the name of his ship?” she asked, as if untrusting of such magic as writing. “I don’t know when it may sail, maybe, so you hurry, eh? Find him quick for me. It’s important that we speak. Okay?”

  “Yes, my lady,” he said earnestly, despite her ragged state. “I go right this minute.”

  “If you cheat me,” she pressed in imitation of other desperate and helpless people she had observed, “I tell everybody at the market here, you cannot be trusted. Don’t you doubt I will, boy.”

  “I would never cheat you!” the lad protested. “I am the best, most honest messenger in all of Alizar.”

  “I hope you are.” Then, more kindly, to encourage him, “I believe you. Find him quick, and I tell everybody that you are the best man to hire.”

  He smiled at this, and dashed off with a reassuring wave, reminding her so much of Pino that she just managed not to laugh. Back when Pino had been her eager and adoring employee, anyway. This thought sobered her again.

  It took little time to do her shopping. After a bit of shrewd bargaining, Sian left the market, balancing a rope sack of mainland potatoes over one arm as her hands gripped an unruly bunch of nearly wilted mustard greens and the ankles of a newly slaughtered chicken. The bird dangled quiescent now, still warm but finished with its gruesome twitching. Inconvenient as it would likely prove to cook over a fire on the beach, she felt confident that this much food would hold her for a couple days. Long enough to work out some better arrangement with Reikos’s help, if her messenger proved as effective as he’d claimed.

  In the meantime, she would still try to find that priest.

  “What was your be-damned message?” she muttered to herself, continuing the one-sided argument she’d been having with the absent priest for days. “For the love of the Seven Unruly Goddesses and their false riders, what would you have me do?”

  The cooling chicken in her grip gave a subtle but unmistakable twitch.

  Flooded with horror, Sian flung the bird against the mud-brown wall of the building next to her. “Don’t you dare!” she shrieked at the bird. “I’ve just had you killed! I’m going to eat you now, not raise you from the dead!”

  The chicken tumbled limply to the ground, where it lay in an inert heap of feather-covered flesh. Only then did Sian notice that people all along the street had stopped to look at her. Alizar was never a quiet place, but generally speaking, people did not scream at dead poultry.

  Sian looked away from the eyes on her and walked over to the bird, studying it for signs of further movement. There were none. She reached down and poked at its body to be sure.

  If anything, it was colder than before, just beginning to stiffen, as a dead bird should. She decided that its tiny, puzzled spirit had finally passed on to whatever other shores accepted such creatures.

  Sian stooped to pick it up again, very carefully, by the ankles, then rose to her feet, reset her veil, and looked around. She had dropped her bag of potatoes in her panic. She wandered back along the sidepath, gathering strays that had escaped.

  A middle-aged woman with an open sore on her narrow face approached her timidly. “Our Lady.” She took a step closer to Sian. “Our Lady of the Islands, heal me, I beg you.”

  People were still staring. More of them, in fact.

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nbsp; Sian tried to still her racing heart, keep her breathing slow. “I have no idea what you mean. I’m no priest.”

  The woman looked confused. Wounded, even. “I saw …” she said quietly. “We all did. The chicken in your hands. You are —”

  “No,” snapped Sian. Did she owe her life — her very safety — to everyone she met? Misery was everywhere; it was endless. She could spend herself night and day, and never put a dent in it — she was miserable herself now, homeless and exhausted and starving, all alone in the world. “Please,” she whispered. “I am no one. I am nothing more than you. Just leave me be!”

  “We beneath your effort then?” This from an older man standing in the shadows of the building she’d flung the chicken at. He took a step forward, limp at the leg, his skin an ugly, mottled color, indicative of an advanced case of the spiderpox. “The God’s gift too precious to waste on lesser people, Domina Kattë?”

  “Of course not…” Sian took a step back, no longer caring about her stray potatoes. He knew who she was. Did everyone? Had her story spread so far — already? How long before the Mishrah-Khote heard of her appearance here? All she wanted was to get back to Pembo’s Beach — to the safety of her boat. “I didn’t mean … I never said —”

  “Bitch,” the man said softly. “I’ve heard how you run off whenever people ask your help. We’ve all heard. Where you been hiding since the God gave you his treasure, eh?”

  Others in the crowd advanced on her now, something harsh and broken in their eyes.

  “I … have not been hiding anywhere,” she stammered, caught between escalating terror and a flash of outrage. “The Mishrah-Khote. They came for me. I have been —”