The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

“Undress her,” Iskra said.

  But when Miranda moved to do so, the girl shrank back from her touch.

  “We’re going to give you a bath,” Miranda said.

  The girl only stared at her.

  “We aren’t going to hurt you,” Miranda said. “I promise.”

  She reached again, and this time the girl lifted her own arms and let Miranda tug the shirt and pajama top over her head. Miranda gasped at what she saw. Naked from the waist up, body stick-thin and pale, the girl’s belly and arms were crosshatched with scars. Fine, meticulous cutting.

  “Who would do this?” Miranda said.

  Iskra snatched the clothes from Miranda, gave the child a glance. “I am sure she did it herself.” She tossed Hiram’s shirt over a straw-bottomed chair across the room. The pajama top she threw in the fire.

  “We’ll need more water,” the witch said to Miranda. “Let the boy fetch it, but keep him out.”

  The girl closed her arms over her chest, sat watching the women work.

  Littlefish, meanwhile, came weaving up the path from the pump in back of the cabin, a bucket sloshing at each side, the third filled and ready at the base of the pump.

  “Stay out here,” Miranda said flatly from the doorway, taking the buckets. “We’ll need more water soon.”

  Who is she? he asked, craning past Miranda.

  But Miranda toed the door shut.

  * * *

  She hunkered in front of the girl, who sat upright on the slatted bench, covering her small breasts. Her eyes roamed over Miranda, the bathhouse walls. Back to Miranda.

  “Close your eyes,” Miranda said. She sat on the bench, reached out, drew a deep breath, then smoothed her palm over the girl’s short hair. The girl flinched away, but not before Miranda felt it: a fleeting sense of something peaceful, a sadness at once familiar and unknowable. The melancholy warmth of sunshine on skin. “Put your head in my lap,” Miranda said, and held her hand away from the girl’s head, an invitation.

  After a moment, the girl lay down on the bench and put her head in Miranda’s lap, and the weight of her was startling and good.

  Miranda released breath she had not even known she was holding.

  Iskra handed Miranda Hiram’s shirt, and Miranda spread it over the girl.

  The girl closed her eyes.

  Time passed, as Iskra made her preparations, and after a while, the child’s breathing deepened, and Miranda realized she was asleep.

  As the loose stones atop the oven grew hot to the touch, Iskra lifted each with a pair of ice tongs and dropped them in a low wooden box beneath the bench. At the old woman’s urging, Miranda slipped away from the bench, setting the girl’s head gently on the slats. She folded her father’s shirt over the straw-bottomed chair back and drew the girl’s pajama bottoms down and Iskra threw these, too, into the fire. Miranda checked the girl’s legs for more scars, more needle marks, but found none.

  Iskra directed her to take up the buckets and pour the water over the stones in the box.

  Steam rose through the slats and the room grew very hot.

  “Now the cauldron,” Iskra said, hooking her tongs on the opposite wall.

  Lest the steam and heat rush out, Miranda opened the door only wide enough to set the empty buckets outside. She glimpsed Littlefish sitting atop the stump where the wood ax was buried. She took up the third bucket of water, which the boy had left at the threshold, and closed the bathhouse door. She poured the water into a black cauldron suspended over the fire. From a bundle hanging from a rafter, Iskra took down three branches of dried eucalyptus and set them in the cauldron. Soon the bathhouse was filled with the sweet scent of eucalyptus leaves cooking.

  Miranda sat in the straw-bottomed chair, which was set against the wall, just below a cracked square of silvered mirror. She waited and watched, her only measure of time’s passage the steady filling and refilling of the buckets when the old woman beckoned. The fire roared hotter, stones hissed, and all the while, dread twisted tighter and tighter in Miranda’s chest like a wire around her heart. Some terrible thing was on its way. She felt it coalescing in the air like the steam itself.

  Iskra took the eucalyptus branches from the cauldron and brushed the child’s body, from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head. She bade Miranda come closer. “Give me your hand,” Iskra said. The old woman’s filleting knife flashed from her apron, faster than Miranda would have believed, and the knife drew a fine red line across her palm. Miranda gasped.

  “Drip it,” the witch said. “Into the box beneath.”

  Miranda saw something in her periphery—a shadow dislodging from a corner. But when she looked at the corner straight on, she saw nothing.

  “Hurry,” the old woman said. “He is coming. Three drops.”

  Miranda squeezed her hand over the box beneath the bench.

  “Now face that wall, and if you must look, use the mirror, but do not interfere and no matter what do not turn around.”

  Miranda backed away until her legs bumped up against the straw-bottomed chair. She turned and faced the wall, and in the mirror she saw Iskra take up a eucalyptus branch in each hand and spread her arms like a squat bird spreading its wings. The witch fanned the branches over the girl’s body, crisscrossing and sweeping, and the steam rose up hot and thick, filling the room, until finally there was nothing but a wall of white heat surrounding them.

  Iskra spoke, in a loud, commanding voice: “Where do you come from?”

  The girl lay unmoving on the bench, eyes shut.

  Iskra whisked the branches and asked the question again, this time in her own harsh tongue. And then, finally, a third time, in English, each word a thunderclap: “WHERE DO YOU COME FROM, POISON?”

  Out of the steam, a voice, small and childlike, a whisper: “… the needle…”

  Iskra licked her lips. “And what do you seek?”

  “… blood…”

  “Is there blood elsewhere?”

  Something rippled beneath the girl’s face, like the fins of bottom-feeders breaking the surface. “… yes…”

  “Then go and find it!”

  The girl’s mouth tightened. She twitched.

  Iskra’s voice was steady. “What do you devour?”

  “… the spirit…”

  “And what do you crave?”

  The voice was small, petulant: “… more!”

  “Are you honey?” the old woman said.

  “… no…”

  “Are you milk?”

  “… no…”

  “Are you bane?”

  The girl seized and thrashed atop the bench. “… YES…”

  “THEN LET THE BANNIK TAKE YOU!” Iskra cried, lashing the child with the branches. “FOR BANE IS THE BANNIK’S MILK! AND BANE IS THE BANNIK’S HONEY!”

  Miranda watched breathless in the silvered mirror. Remembering her own time in the bathhouse, ten years past. Whatever words the old woman had called down out of the air that night, Miranda had forgotten all of them save one: bannik. Blood crusting her bare feet like socks, poison hissing from an arm that had steamed like hot metal dropped into water, it had come—

  bannik

  —and now, as a tarry ooze welled up from the holes in the girl’s arms and ran slowly in black rivulets over her skin, and Miranda shut her eyes against the terror, even as the girl’s flew apart like shutters, the monster came again.

  BANNIK

  The girl opened her mouth to scream, but it was no scream that came out of her.

  An ash cloud erupted from her throat and spread among the rafters like an angry swarm.

  Miranda forced her eyes open and saw, in the silvered glass, the walls of the bathhouse dissolve into white, the whole room blinding.

  Out of the steam, the bannik shambled forth.

  It was a demon, hideous and ugly and goblin-small. A wild mane of hair flamed from its skull to its waist. Its cheekbones were sharp above its beard. Its eyes twin red slits in an ancient, leathery face cracked in
a toothy smile that floated in the steam, huge and grotesque. The demon’s twiglike fingers seemed to hold the smile in place, as if it were a thing detachable. It was not a grin but a curved saw, a crude surgical instrument from olden times, with two wooden handles, and the bannik was lowering it over the girl’s body, from torso to legs, where Iskra’s own filleting knife hovered just above the joining of leg and hip.

  “Here,” the old witch said, and the bannik dropped its saw into the joint and began to cut.

  Miranda felt her stomach plunge.

  Without thinking, she whirled and cried, “STOP!”

  The demon sprang across the child, throwing the old witch aside. It rushed Miranda in three sideways lopes and struck her, locking short, powerful legs around her waist. No time to cry out, she fell over the straw-bottomed chair and the bannik pressed her flat to the ground, smothering her with its weight. Long, stick-like claws seized her throat. Hot breath at her ear, jaws snarling, snapping.

  “Bannik!” Iskra cried, eyes on the floor, knife and arms spread over the girl.

  “You fear the cutting?” the bannik hissed.

  “Forgive her, bannik!” the old witch begged.

  The demon struck Miranda’s left ear with the back of its hand. Its knuckles burned like sandpaper. “Peeling is truth! See what you were never meant to see!” Its voice was rough and phlegmy and possessed of age beyond measure, lips black and thin. “What would you see? Your old witch’s secret, would you know it?”

  “Close your eyes!” Iskra cried.

  Miranda did, but still, she saw it: a glimpse of Hiram’s face upside down in the dark, lit from below by flashlight. Suspended over a great wide maw—

  Laughter as the demon let go of her throat, and then its weight and stink were gone.

  Miranda, sputtering. Throat and lungs on fire. Scratches welling red on her cheeks. She hauled herself up by the wall studs and stood bloody before the silvered square of mirror, each breath a ragged draw.

  The bannik let out a cackle and took up its saw from the floor, and now the witch moved her knife over the child’s hip, and the demon began to saw again. Black smoke plumed from the wound, and the severed limb began to float, to drift free, and up it rose, into the rafters, where it was swallowed by the cloud that had earlier issued from the girl’s mouth.

  And yet: the child’s leg remained fastened to her body. No cut had been made.

  “Here,” Iskra said, positioning her knife over the other leg.

  The demon’s saw drifted, and soon the other leg was untethered and floating.

  Each arm at the shoulder. The head, beneath the jaw.

  The witch’s knife played guide to the demon’s cuts, until together they had created a bevy of limbs that bobbed like Littlefish’s trotlines in the rafters of the bathhouse, each severed stump spewing an inky stream of poison, each stream feeding into the wider pool of black spreading over the bathhouse ceiling.

  It’s all the bad, Miranda thought. This happened to you once.

  She glanced down at her arm, the white scar where the snake had struck.

  The fire in the oven threw wild shadows in the steam.

  Iskra tucked her knife into her apron.

  The demon opened its mouth, drew its breath, and now the dark cloud and the bathhouse steam were pulled in a whirling funnel into the creature, and a sound like a great roaring of some deep river-chorus of frogs filled the room, swelling inside their skulls, until Miranda’s head was throbbing with a pulsing horror, thick fingers in her ears pushing in slowly to meet in the middle, until finally all vapor inside the room was consumed, and the sound faded as the demon’s jaws, now distended, cracked shut, leaving only silence and the child’s severed limbs to fade into the ether in the dim light above the slatted bench.

  The air was dry and hot.

  “It is done,” Iskra said, voice quavering.

  Miranda turned from the mirror.

  Iskra stepped away from the child, then staggered, went down on her knees.

  Behind her, the girl sprang upright on the bench and planted her bare feet in the moist earth. She reached out and spread both hands across Iskra’s cheeks. The girl’s eyes were huge and white.

  Miranda started for the old woman, but stopped when the child opened her mouth and began to sing.

  The girl sang with the voice of a child, but it was not hers. It was a rough voice, harsh with grief, and the words she sang were in Baba’s deep, guttural tongue, and the song she sang was long and terrible in its warp and weft, as if torn out of the peat-smelling earth itself.

  Iskra hung between the girl’s hands like a woman enthralled, her own eyes brimming with sudden tears as the song pealed out.

  The wail fell silent.

  The girl’s frame sagged and Iskra, released, dropped onto hands and knees. She crawled away, toward Miranda, who went to her, put her arms around the old woman.

  The girl straightened, blinking away tears of her own. She peered into the shadows and corners of the bathhouse. She settled her gaze on the old witch and Miranda, then said, in a voice that was small and frightened and very much a child’s: “Who are you?”

  SUNLIGHT

  Through a crack in the bathhouse doorway, Littlefish watched, though he couldn’t see much, just a vague sense of bodies moving.

  The door opened and Iskra came hobbling out. “Help me,” she said to the boy, offering her arm, and the boy took it and walked the old woman over to the stump where the ax was lodged.

  “I am an old rag,” she said. She blew air between her lips and lifted the long tail of her housedress and flapped it to cool herself.

  The boy looked anxiously toward the bath, but Iskra touched his arm and said, “Stay by me.”

  He stayed.

  Iskra heard, again, the bannik’s voice: Your old witch’s secret, would you know it?

  Great leshii, the witch thought, has the hour finally come?

  The boy touched her shoulder, his lumpen face twisted with concern.

  He made motions with his hands, but these were words the old witch had never bothered to learn. She pressed the heel of her hand beneath her heart. Looked away.

  * * *

  The girl flinched when the towel from Miranda’s long green duffel went around her shoulders. The thing with the beard and red eyes had been bad, so bad, but something in the old woman’s mind had cried out, a memory more terrible than even the demon’s fury, and the girl had heard the song as if from the bottom of a deep, dark well, and that well was herself, so she had opened her mouth and the words were drawn up and out of her. She did not understand their meaning, seeing in her mind only a single image that was the story they told: digging a hole, filling a hole, covering the dirt with rocks.

  But there was more.

  The demon’s cutting had opened other doors, doors within the girl’s own heart, doors to her awful power. The cutting had not frightened her. It made things better. This she understood, because it always had, ever since she’d first discovered a pack of razor blades left behind on a kitchen sink in one of the trailers. But the demon wasn’t good, and like the greedy thing it was, it had stolen through those open doors and seen everything the girl saw, including the old woman’s secrets. Something about this place. It made no sense for the girl to know this because this was not her home, home was where the ladies worked in the trailers and that was gone now, burned, all the ladies ash and bone—should I cry for them, should I cry for them at all—because they could not see the black coiling cloud that brought the black-clad men with their fire and axes and guns and sharp teeth, and before that, where was she?

  But none of that mattered, not now, because the blackness was not here, not in this place, wherever she was—the bannik was not the only spirit here and his was not the only kind, some were good and green, like the glimmer in the darkness she had seen first waking on the river—and now the woman named Miranda was putting her strong arms around the girl, holding her, resting her chin on top of the girl’s head. A
nd that was far from dark. It was nice. Very good. Very soft. Outside, all around, was the green, life. Sunlight instead of shadow.

  She had not seen real sunlight in a very long time.

  * * *

  Miranda went to the duffel where it hung on the hook by the door and took out a pair of jeans and a faded blue T-shirt, clothes she had lifted from a drawer in her childhood dresser. From the back of the straw-bottomed chair, she took Hiram’s long-sleeve shirt the girl had worn earlier and folded it. She set the stack of clothes on the bench beside the child, whose eyes—a pretty, solemn shade of blue—now followed Miranda with a clarity that had not been present before.

  “These should fit you,” Miranda said. Her words were craggy, her throat swollen and raw where the demon had choked her.

  The girl did not answer.

  “You’re safe now,” Miranda said. “Do you understand?”

  The girl’s eyes cut to the doorway, through it the old woman and the boy at the stump, Iskra’s legs splayed, her dress hiked above her knees.

  Miranda wondered at the secrets the old woman held yet. All these years, muttering to the house spirit, dead flies in a spoon, a never-ending litany of bedtime stories, tales brought from another world: new brides carrying fire in skulls; princes sealed in barrels and tossed in rivers; a little mouse, Myshka, taken apart by a demon’s magic, put back together.

  She felt something, a fluttering, as if—

  “She has one more,” the girl said.

  —as if a little bird had flown into her mind, careened among her thoughts.

  Dizzy from it, Miranda closed her hands around the bench on either side of the girl, took a deep breath, let it out. “One more what?” she said.

  “Story. She wants to tell you now. She’s been waiting so long.” The girl’s eyes were strange and cold. “You won’t like the way it ends.”

  The taste of blood rose in her mouth. Miranda pointed at the clothes on the bench. “Put those on,” she said. She put her hand over her mouth and went out and around the corner of the bathhouse into the sunlight, where she bent by the woodpile and vomited into the grass.