by Wendy Orr
Her lips quiver, her tongue comes out to lick the honey, but she doesn’t wake.
What do I do, what do I do, what do I do?
If she were a baby, she’d need changing, but the blood on her face is more frightening, so that’s what I do first. One of the baskets holds a loosely woven cloth to protect food from insects. I pour olive oil onto it, and start gently wiping the blood from her forehead. At first I’m so tentative that I barely touch her; the cloth is covered with blood, but it doesn’t look as if any has gone from her face. I pour on more oil and try again.
Most of the blood has come from a big cut just under the hairline, though her face is scratched and bruised all over. Her nose, that strong beautiful nose, is crooked; when I wash around her mouth her tongue comes out again, with a broken tooth on it. I take it out and put it by a table leg so we don’t lose it.
By the time I’m ready to wash her lower half, it’s stopped seeming strange and wrong. It’s something I have to do, like some of the odder tasks to prepare for the Learning, and until I’ve finished I don’t have to worry about what to do next.
The dim daylight fades.
In the darkness, there is no time. I don’t know how long we’ve been here. Long enough that I have to sidle out of our table shelter again to pee in the corner; Mama, I think, has peed again since I cleaned her. There is nothing soft to lie her on, nothing dry; all I can do is smooth olive oil down her legs as I would a baby.
I will die here,
shrivelled like a snail in summer
in the shell of this house
not maiden or mother or crone
not even a memory
if there is no one left to remember.
Maybe Mama is lucky:
not yet dead, but feeling nothing.
Then Mama groans,
so I know she can feel;
a lion fierceness roars through me
because she is not Mama now
but my own babe,
and I, blind in the darkness,
walk my fingers to the wall
for more precious sheltered pots;
dip my finger into honey again
and when her tongue takes it,
drizzle in drops of pure sweet wine –
in hope that it will lull her pain.
‘Drink, Mama,’ I say,
‘Drink and be well.’
And I have the same:
honey on my tongue
to sweeten the wine,
then curl up by my mother
and sleep.
A crash jolts me awake, my heart pounding. The house is falling on us!
But the house isn’t shaking. The sound is someone upstairs shoving things across the floor.
‘Nunu!’
No answer, just another crash. Nunu’s not dead! She’s trapped upstairs as Mama and I are trapped down here.
Scrambling out from under the table to the vestibule, I hobble to the stairs. The last time I saw them, before the roof blocked the light from the window, each step was broken in the middle and covered with chunks of wall.
Another crash. Still no answer when I shout.
Even my hands are blind in this blackness; I kneel on the bottom step, sweep my forearm across the next one to clear it, and crawl up to it. I feel unbalanced, because steps should be flat, and these slope down from a peak in the middle. The only thing that’s even is how much my knees hurt, because I’ve only knocked enough rubble off that I can get up there. There are still lots of sharp pieces left to dig into me.
With each step there’s more wreckage, and the chunks of masonry are bigger. One big piece bounces past me and tumbles to the bottom, just like Mama did. Mama who is lying helpless, just through the doorway from the bottom of the stairs.
What if it’s hit her and I’ve killed her!
I slide down, bringing more brokenness with me, landing on the big chunk that’s crashed at the bottom.
Of course it didn’t bounce through the doorway and onto Mama!
How could I know that on a day when the world has changed?
I can’t go back up without checking her again. My ear on her chest tells me that she’s still breathing, her heart still beating. I whisper my lips over her face, guided by her breath, and meet no chunks of wall, but a taste of blood in my mouth.
I can’t do this.
But I can’t sit here and wait to die, or wait for Nunu to get through, which might be the same thing.
‘I’ll be back, Mama,’ I tell her. ‘Don’t move!’ Even though I’ve been begging her to do that since she landed here, that lifetime ago.
I creep back up the stairs, shoving and kicking the debris behind me as I climb. The blackness is still complete, and the sharp-edged shards still make me squeak and bleed, but I don’t care anymore. I’ve tried too hard to wait and die now.
The stairs go on forever. It feels as if I’ve climbed far enough to be on the roof when I touch a wall in front of me – and I realise I’ve only reached the first bend.
No matter how hard I try to picture the stairs as they used to be, when they were smooth and straight and the staircase was lined with paintings, I have no idea how many steps there are. All I can do is creep around the bend and find the first stair. My head is spinning, and I think I might have slept for a moment – it’s hard to tell in this blackness, but I hear myself calling Nunu for a cup of water, as if I’ve forgotten where I am and why I’m thirsty.
Nunu shouts back.
I can’t quite hear the words, but whatever they are, they’re better than water, better than wine, and I’m wide awake again. I scramble up the ruined stairs to the landing.
I know it’s the landing because when I run my hands along the walls, they come to an end where there should be an opening – I should be stepping straight into the day room, and finding Nunu. Instead there’s another wall.
I bang my fists on it, and it shifts a bit.
‘Nunu!’
‘Leira!’ Her voice comes from just on the other side of this new wall. ‘Have you brought help? Is your Dada here?’
I’ve been counting on Nunu to help me, not need help!
‘Just me.’
‘But your mama – where is she?’
There’s panic in her voice – Nunu, who pulls fishhooks from fingers without a blink; who caught my brother Ibi by the heels as he fell from a window, before I was born. Nunu, who’s afraid of nothing, is afraid. I can’t tell her about Mama, not now.
‘Nunu, what’s blocking the stairs?’
‘The ceiling. The pillar’s collapsed…there’s nothing left.’
She’s going mad. The day room is so big that it has a central pillar to hold up the roof. It’s huge and strong, like the tree it was carved from. It can’t just collapse.
‘You shouldn’t be up here – it’s not safe. Go back to your mama.’
She sounds exhausted. Nunu, I realise, is crying. Crying because she thinks she’s alone, and that I’m free to leave the house, to find my parents and safety. And none of those things are true.
‘Move back!’ I say, and standing with one foot on the top step and one on the step below, I throw my whole weight at the blocking wall.
It creaks, but doesn’t move. I try it again, again and again, and just when I think I can’t try it one more time, it shifts and crashes to the floor. I fall through onto a pile of rubble: the pillar, roof tiles, bricks and wall plaster. My eyes are stinging and blinking, because the dawn light is streaming in where the roof used to be.
It’s a miracle that Nunu wasn’t crushed. Part of the roof and second floor are scattered over the day room; the wall to the shrine room is down, and the servants’ stairs have completely disappeared under piles of wall. But the big windows out to Triangle Plaza are still there, and that’s almost worse. Because it’s not just our home that’s in ruins, it’s the whole town. The streets are heaped with rubble; Pellie’s house is open to the world with the whole front wall missing. Further out, smaller houses a
nd streets have completely disappeared – the town is nothing but a field of dusty rocks.
Yet the real fields, the hills and pastures, are still green and whole. It seems wrong. They should be torn apart and weeping too.
I see all this – think all this – in the time it takes me to turn my head and see Nunu. Looking as old as her own grandmother, she scrambles over to throw her arms around me. I’ve never realised before how much taller I am than her. It’s like hugging a bony little bird.
‘Where’s your mama?’ she asks again, and this time I have to tell the truth. She looks so fragile that I think it will break her, but instead it turns her back into Nunu.
‘We’ve got to get back to her,’ she says, turning to reach for a bed covering that she must have pulled out earlier; it’s spread across another piece of wall, as if to dry. ‘It rained in the night,’ she explains, and starts down the stairs.
It’s easier now that there’s light. Not much of it reaches under the table in the kitchen, but enough that Nunu can see my sleeping mother and her wounded face.
‘What can we do?’ she whispers.
That’s not what she was supposed to say. Nunu is supposed to know what to do; that’s her job. She always knows, even when it’s something that Mama needs to decide, Nunu mutters a word or lifts an eyebrow so we all know that she could have done it better.
‘More honey and wine,’ I tell her. ‘She’ll take that on her tongue.’ Because with the dim light from the stairwell trickling in, I know what I need to do.
The front door and the window beside it are blocked by a huge beam; I can’t move it, but surely I can shove the door open the way I did upstairs. I squeeze my legs under the beam and push with my feet till my stomach cramps and sweat pours down my face. The door doesn’t budge.
I have to find another way.
Leaving Nunu weeping as she drizzles honey onto Mama’s tongue, I creep cautiously back up the stairs. A chunk of masonry rolls from the top, crashing against the front door beam and bouncing to the kitchen doorway. Nunu shrieks with the shock of it.
‘Goddess leaping! Are you trying to kill us?’
She sounds cross enough that I know they weren’t hurt. I keep on going.
I was downstairs longer than I realised; the sun is halfway up now. The brightness makes the shock worse all over again: this is not my home, this pile of brokenness open to the sky.
The world outside the window isn’t mine either. It’s like one of the strange ruined cities in the far-off places Dada visits. And the longer I stare, the more I understand that I can’t wait for anyone to rescue us.
I have to see what’s blocking our door.
So I drop to my belly on the shard-sharp-floor, staring down to Triangle Plaza, wiggling out on the windowsill one painful handbreadth and another – if the earthmother shakes me out of here I’ll be dead for sure! – until I can see the mound of bricks piled up against our wall, blocking the door and downstairs windows.
That’s Pellie’s front wall! Thrown all the way from her house to ours.
Where is Pellie?
No wonder I couldn’t kick the door open.
My thoughts are still racing, not believing, when out of the corner of my eye I see movement
Men are clambering over the broken bricks into Triangle Plaza, Dada and Ibi in the lead.
The flood of relief
blinds me,
washes away my burdens
till I’m so light I could float
like a feather to their feet.
For the men of the shipsheds are strong
and will do what my father says.
They are all – Dada and Ibi too –
covered with dust,
red, black and white
like the stones that used to be our city;
clothes torn –
one has lost his cloak
and another his loincloth –
and streaked with blood
as if they were slaves.
But when I shriek
they look up and I see
they truly are my father and brother,
who will save us.
I’m shouting that Mama is hurt
and trapped,
when the chief joins them
and all turn to see the Lady’s house
as the ground shudders again
and the side wall crumples
becoming more garbage
strewn across the plaza.
The men jump to safety;
they don’t scream as I do
but their mouths and eyes
are horrified Os.
‘The Lady and her people
are out and safe,’ says the chief,
‘turn to your own.’
Dada is already shoving,
hauling, angling rocks with poles
working with his men
to clear our door
though Ibi pauses to call me,
‘If Mama is hurt as you say,
we’ll need a bed to move her.’
He throws a rope, neatly coiled,
and I catch,
without knowing why.
Hot anger burns off relief –
I thought they would fix things
or tell me what to do
because how will I find a bed
under these walls
and what am I to do with the rope?
I never knew anger could be good –
but it pushes my floppy body
away from the edge
standing it upright to climb broken walls
to where my sleeping room used to be.
Across our bright and lovely day room,
where yesterday, a lifetime ago,
we sat at our looms
and I worried about
becoming a woman –
now I step on something sharp
and my foot drips blood like the dying Kora’s –
the shuttle snaps in two.
Even the wall
between sleeping room and lavatory
is gone, though the toilet is whole –
the only seat in the house not broken
so when I see it
I can’t wait any longer,
and am grateful for the piece of outside wall
still standing.
The sleeping room isn’t quite as broken as everything else. The clothes chest is smashed, my wall with the swallows is gone and Nunu’s sleeping mat is buried, but my bed is still there. The coverings are tumbled on the floor beside it, as if I’ve just got up and Nunu hasn’t had a chance to tidy it yet.
I wish that was true. I wish I’d just woken and this was nothing but a demon-dream. ‘Shush,’ Nunu would say, ‘Open your eyes – see how the goddess has chased the demons away.’
This time the demons have won.
I still don’t understand how Ibi means to carry Mama on the bed, or what I’m supposed to do with the rope. And I don’t know how I can push the bed across these mounds of debris and down the broken stairs.
My toes curl into the softness of the bed fleeces beneath them. I don’t know what Ibi means about beds – but we can wrap Mama warmly in these and carry her to safety.
Safety? Where’s that? I’ve seen the broken town!
Dada will know. Just do this.
I tie the bedcoverings into an awkward bundle, stumbling and falling as I try to carry it across the broken walls. My body lands soft on the bedding but my palms are bleeding again.
The men are still clearing the doorway, at the other end of the wall. I shove my bundle through a window. The fleeces and fine linen coverings slip out from my knot, landing scattered across the ground like wounded birds; the end of the rope is still in my hands.
I go back for the bed. Without the covers, it’s just goathide laced tightly to a frame of wooden poles. I suddenly realise what Ibi means. With a quick shove, I flip the bed over, thread the rope around the front strut, and drag it to the windows, hoping
nothing sharp will cut the hides.
That part is almost easy. Shoving it through a window is not, and I need to lower it slowly – it won’t land as soft as fleeces. I realise too late the rope needs to be at the back and now I’ve got it jammed partway out the window.
‘Slimeface!’ I swear at it. ‘Fishbreathed, purple-stinking billy goat!’
The bed doesn’t care, but I feel stronger. I finally yank it back, pick myself up from where it’s landed on me, insult it again, then stand it on end and cartwheel it over the sill and through the window.
It just fits.
I shove it the rest of the way, holding tight to the end of the rope.
‘Ibi! I’ve got it!’
My father and brother look up, and rush towards the lowering bed.
It’s getting heavier, going faster…If I don’t let go soon it’ll pull me out the window too.
They grab it just in time.
‘Good,’ Dada calls. ‘Now come down before the goddess shakes again. We’re nearly through to the door.’
His face is grey. It’s the first time I’ve seen my father look like an old man.
An edge of Mama’s cloak is sticking out from under a pile of wall fragments. This is my only chance to get what we need, for wherever we’re going. I tug it out, tearing a corner. She’ll be cross when she wakes up.
‘Come down now!’ Dad shouts from the street.
I turn to his voice, and see my flounced skirt in the cleared space where my bed had been. Nunu must have laid it out for the solstice party. I grab it with a gasp of relief, hugging it tight as I flee. How would I have finished my Learning without it? I might never have become a woman.
It’s like the procession of the spring festival, when the whole town carries their house goddess up to the shrine on Crocus Mountain so she can feed on the sacrifices and bring fruitfulness to the home. Except instead of goddesses carved from wood or stone, we’re carrying real people of bleeding flesh and broken bone. And no one is singing.
Mama is one of the lucky ones carried on an upside-down bed, Ibi and Dada taking the front legs, two sailors taking the back. Every little while they stop and change places so the other arm takes the weight; where the path is level they lift the bed to their shoulders.
Nunu and I are carrying baskets of food: dried figs and dried fish, small flasks of honey, wine and oil. I wish I knew how to carry one on my head like a peasant. Nunu must have learned when she was young but she’s too stooped now – it would topple off in front of her. The bigger baskets are strapped to our backs and we each carry another; like the men, we change arms, carry them hugged to our chests, lift them to our shoulders – anything to change the strain and lessen the pain.