by Wendy Orr
And now there is sickness. It begins with shivering and a streaming nose, then a sore throat and a cough that doesn’t stop till the breath is gone and the person faints. That’s when the fever comes in: the sweats and shaking and delirium. And then death.
The first dawn that we were woken by unearthly wails, Rika herself raced to the shed to investigate, returning grave but not shaken.
‘It was our oldest woman servant,’ she said, pointing her fingers against evil. ‘She’d already lived past her time.’
There’d been so much death already, even a young mother of our clan, and two potters at the height of their powers from Nunu’s sister-in-law’s workshop. The Lady and Kora went to the animal shed with a prayer to cleanse the death spirit, but we weren’t disturbed by the keening when the old woman was buried that afternoon. Only Nunu, sweeping out the central room where we are still living, stopped to stand with her hand on her heart, her lips moving in a chant to the dead as the burial procession passed.
Farewell to life,
the sun and sky,
now you depart
for our mother’s heart.
Farewell to toil,
to sea and soil,
for you will rest,
in our mother’s breast.
Your days are done
your life here gone
the mother has chosen
you for her own.
Stay with her there
and leave us here.
Nunu sang those last lines a few times, hoping that the goddess wouldn’t need another old woman for a while, but it hasn’t worked. The goddess keeps wanting more, and she doesn’t just want old ones. Before the moon is full again, she takes nearly everyone in the shed, and then she starts on the house.
She takes Kora late one morning, and before that same day’s sunset she takes the Lady.
The wise-woman beckons me. ‘It’s time to prepare them for the goddess.’
‘I haven’t finished my Learning!’ I protest.
‘You’re an almost-woman and the closest relative,’ she replies shortly. ‘The Lady’s only living daughter is still a child; she has no sister, and her other two cousins cannot get here in time.’
She doesn’t mention Mama, except to add more gently, ‘I’ll show you what to do, and her maidservant will help. This is part of life – and it won’t be as hard as looking after your mother alone in the dark, when your house fell on you.’
She is right. We do Kora first, before she stiffens, because they’d been afraid to let the Lady know that her daughter had died – though she knew, of course she knew, says the wise-woman, any mother would have known. We wash and oil her body, and I arrange her in ceremonial dress, with all her jewellery, and bind her arms and legs so that she cannot fight her fate, or flop loose on the burying board on the way to her grave. As I do it she becomes less Kora and more Gellia, the cousin I played with as a child; tears blind me as I thread her round gold hoops through the holes in her ears.
‘Sorry,’ I say, because I’ve missed and stabbed her right ear. ‘Sorry.’
But for the Lady, the fact of who she is – who she was – weighs heavier and heavier on me as we go on. Our goddess has no servant; we have no Lady and guide to our goddess.
We sit with them all the next day, keening and chanting. The room becomes crowded with women as the Swallow Clan arrive: three girls of my Learning come with their mothers, but not Pellie, whose little sister is sick, or Alia or her grandmother. Alia’s leg was broken when a wall fell on it; Rastia tells me she died three days ago, and her grandmother the next day. Alia and I were not close like Pellie and me, but she was my kin, part of my life and a Learning sister; it’s hard to believe she is gone, and that I hadn’t even known. Rastia and I weep together, and Tullie and Chella join us.
When the men arrive, I hold my breath until I see my father and Ibi, afraid that they’ve died too without my knowing. I cling to Dada the way I used to when I was a child and he was about to disappear on his ship for the long sailing season.
The burial procession starts with the dawn the following morning. The chief has said they must be buried in the proper place, no matter how difficult, and the wise-woman agrees. We must pick up the pieces of our world and show the gods that we’re worthy of life; that we treat her servants with respect.
As we start out, I can’t help thinking of the old servant woman’s death, with Nunu’s brief chant the only notice from the house. Now Nunu is the only one to stay behind, to care for Mama.
When did I stop thinking of Mama as one of us? Mama and Nunu are both staying behind. It’s just that Nunu is the only one who knows it.
The chief leads the procession, with his young daughter and his son Lius. I’ve never noticed before what a good-looking boy Lius is. Grief makes him seem older; he’s nearly as tall as his father as he takes his little sister’s hand, pulling her gently along with him. It’s too bad he’s younger than me…How can I think that now, at the funeral of his mother and sister, my aunt and cousin, the Lady and Kora?
It’s a relief when the wise-women start keening. The high ululation unlocks the horror inside me, pulsating in my ears and throat, driving out thought, driving out everything except its own pure grief: for the Lady and Kora, for all the dead, for our beautiful city and my beautiful home in it, for my Mama, who sleeps on like a grub in a cocoon while the living die around her.
My own keening mingles with the others’ till I can’t hear it alone, because we are one, from Swallow Clan to slaves – all one and all emptied, hollowed out by grief and sound. The little girl stumbles back to me, trying to wail through her tears, and I take her hand while Lius joins his father, taking his turn at banging the bronze shield gong all along the way.
The sun rises behind us as we reach the top of Crocus Mountain. The slopes brighten to green grass, white rock and red clay; the sea shimmers from dawn grey to early morning blue. Even the town, when it first comes into view, looks normal and right, as if we’re on our way home.
But it’s not normal or right, and we’re not going home. We keep on the path past the stink of the purple works, on to the bend where Triangle Plaza and the roof of our home should be clear to see.
Dada, Ibi and the chief have talked of all the work that’s been done. I’ve seen from their grey faces and sweat-stained, filthy tunics that they’ve worked as long and hard as anyone could, for the cycle of two full moons. I thought the town would be starting to look whole again – not quite perfect, but like a room that needs sweeping.
It’s still a pile of stones and brokenness. It’s worse than I remembered, much worse than I’ve imagined. I can’t pick out the Plaza, the temple, the Lady’s House or ours. It’s not home at all, and if I wasn’t already keening I’d be screaming now. It’s a relief to veer east to the cemetery before we reach the outer houses, because I don’t want to see any more of what used to be my home. The voices crescendo behind me as the other women reach the bend and see the ruins, and I’m fiercely glad to hear it. It would be beyond bearing to see and feel this misery alone.
It’s true, the wailing says, it’s true, the gong beats, this pain is true, this terror is true, we all feel it, we all see it: the gods have betrayed us and everything terrible is true.
Even the little lamb, carried over the farmer’s shoulder, starts to bleat as if it knows its fate.
But when the ritual is done, when the Lady and Kora have been laid in their graves – two more graves in the midst of so many, but a more terrible loss than a thousand of those common mounds – when their gifts of gold and bronze, honey and oil have been placed with them before the earth covers them forever, when the chief slits the lamb’s throat and the blood spurts onto the fresh dirt, feeding the great mother, the goddess of earth and death, in the hope that she will care for them and for us – I wonder how this one little lamb will be enough, when she has already taken more people than we can count.
‘The ship is ready,’ Dada is saying.
&n
bsp; It’s the news I’ve been dreading. This long winter is ending, and the coming full moon will be the spring festival and the start of the sailing season.
Pellie’s mother will celebrate it as the new Lady; Pellie’s older sister is the new Kora. The chief announced them after the burials, when our faces were still streaked with the mud of mourning and the blood of the lamb, but the Swallow Clan had decided it together. Pellie and I held hands as we listened with our sister Learners.
There wasn’t much discussion. As the wise-woman told Nunu when we returned, ‘By the lines of birth and breeding it would be your mistress, but…’ She gestures at my mother, sleeping curled like a baby on her bed, and is kind enough not to go on.
I’ve never wanted to be Kora – I’ve never thought about it – why would I? But now rage bubbles, sick as the stench of a goddess burp, because if Mama were well and could have taken her proper role, I’d have become Kora – and one day, the Lady.
Instead, it’s another thing that’s gone with Mama’s accident.
The chief will stay the chief, but Pellie’s mother won’t put her husband aside to marry him. They are still in a farmhouse on the town side of Crocus Mountain. It’s even more crowded than here – and although Pellie’s little sister has recovered, they’ve had deaths from the sickness there too. The chief says he will move his household when the sickness ends, but for now, the chief and the Lady are not in the same home, and the world seems as crooked as a broken pot stuck together with reeds and fresh clay. The two sides meet, but the mend shows, and the pot always leaks.
Now Dada and Ibi will be leaving. My world will break a little bit more.
And the goddess is belching every few days, reminding us that more change is coming.
‘Leaving,’ says Dada, and I can’t hear more,
as if the sea that will take him
is already roaring between us.
To be alone with Nunu and Mama
in this house of strangers –
because though Rika is kind,
grateful for my help
and lets me hold her baby,
she’s too conscious of my status
to remember I’m a girl,
and the wise-women,
only one rung down
and known in my life before,
have time for nothing but illness
and exhausted sleep.
‘Do you hear me?’ asks Dada.
‘We will take your mother
from this place of illness and death
to the palace of Tarmara
in the Great Island where Glaucus stays.
The wise-women there will heal her
if the goddess wills it.’
‘What about me?’ I wail,
like a child afraid to be alone.
‘Will I go to Pellie and the Lady?’
Because the coming of spring
will be the next season of Learning
and I still haven’t learned
the rites of midwinter.
A sudden comfort –
no matter how crowded the house,
how ill the servants
or how strange it will be
to call her sister Kora,
being with my friend
is like a wish from another life
that will make this one
easier to bear.
‘Stay with Pellie?’ my father roars,
with his voice from the sea,
‘Desert your mama?
You’ll come with us,
and watching over her,
you’ll grow strong
and beautiful again –
better to wait for womanhood
than to die learning.’
This house has no mirrors
but in my father’s voice I see
how thin I’ve grown,
broken-nailed and grimed,
smelling like a slave.
His voice changes, and as if in a song,
he tells of the town,
near in beauty to our own
with wise-women as skilled as ours
in rooms of comfort,
food and herbs to spare,
as we once had.
The same gods reign –
their earthmother a sister to our own,
the small gods of rivers and trees
are cousin-kin;
we speak the same tongue,
worship the same way,
and most of all –
my brother will be there,
wise in the ways of the court.
‘And you,’ I say, but Dada smiles sadly,
‘The land needs its trade.
We must go on around the sea,
buying what we can
with what we’ve sold,
to return in autumn
with wealth to rebuild.’
But he has no answer
to how I will complete my Learning
or become a woman,
except to say again
that if the goddess wants me to serve
and bear children to serve in their turn
she needs me to live.
‘Sometimes,’ says Dada,
‘even the gods have to change to survive.’
Part of me thinks
that it’s easy for him to say
because he’s already a man
and so are his sons
but another part is filled
with excitement and hope
that Mama will be well
and we will live as we ought:
safe, comfortable
and even happy.
Mama’s wounds are mostly healed now; she looks like herself. She can sit up. With someone at her side she can stand while her bed is cleared, and with two people she can move from her bed to a chair or squat over a chamber pot. She says ‘yes-yes-yes’ and ‘no-no-no’, and though she sometimes gets them backwards if she grows too excited, we can always tell which she means. For everything else she says, ‘Fish.’ We know now it doesn’t mean fish – except sometimes at dinner. Sometimes she gets angry when we don’t understand, and shouts, ‘Fish, fish, FISH!’ louder and louder, as if we’re just not listening properly. Other times she looks sad, as if she understands that she isn’t making sense, and murmurs it over and over, ‘fish, fish, fish, oh fish, fish, fish.’ But most of the time she seems quite happy, chattering like a baby. ‘Fish?’ she’ll ask, and when I say, ‘Yes, Mama,’ she smiles and repeats it.
It’s hard to say ‘yes’ and smile when your mother is talking nonsense. I can’t always do it. ‘No, Mama, Chance is a puppy, not a fish! You want to pee, not fish!’
Then Mama cries, and Nunu – sharp-tongued, cranky Nunu – soothes her, murmuring and stroking her back. She’s very good at sounding gentle while her tongue whips this ungrateful daughter, this girl who is not yet a woman and it’s just as well because she’s not ready to be a mother if she can be so cruel, and would she scold her puppy if it didn’t understand?
But Mama’s not a puppy or a baby, and she’s not an ancient woman without teeth or wits. She’s a broken spirit living in my mother’s body.
We’ve sung to that broken spirit for nearly three moon cycles, and it hasn’t healed yet. Dada is right – we have to take her somewhere else.
But ships can’t sail till after the full moon of the spring festival. The moon is barely at the half now, not a quarter of the way through the cycle; I’ll be here for that next step of my Learning.
I wake to greet the dawn with him; we don’t sing it as Mama or the Lady would, but stand together, hands on hearts to watch the sun rise from the sea, before sharing bread and a cup of wine-milk.
‘I’ll finish the loading of the ship,’ he says. ‘The men will stay behind to carry your mother more slowly. Pack everything except the pot I gave our hosts. We’ll sleep at the shipshed and sail at dawn.’
‘Dawn tomorrow?’
He nods, trotting out his old saying, �
�The gods choose the weather and we must follow.’
‘But you’ve always said that’s why the sailing season is when it is – the gods chose the weather between the spring festival and the autumn, and you follow within it.’
‘This time we follow outside it.’
There’s more he’s not telling me, but I know Dada too well to go on asking.
Nunu will come with us, of course, but Dada gives the young maid Tiny and an older manservant the choice – the man says he’ll try his luck as a sailor, but I’ve seen Tiny with one of the goatherds, so I’m not surprised that she decides to stay on the farm. What I am surprised about is Dada giving them a choice. I thought he might have given them to the farmers and saved the bronze pot.
‘I don’t want people on the ship who don’t want to be there,’ he says.
The other surprise is that Ibi plans to bring his wife and baby son. He’s with them now, and will meet us at the shipsheds. The farmhouse they’re staying in had little damage, and though it’s overcrowded, I don’t think they’ve had much sickness. I ask if they will stay in Tarmara with us, but Dada isn’t sure.
‘We’ll worry about getting everyone there first,’ he says, and out of all these strange things – going outside the sailing season, giving servants a choice, taking Ibi’s family as well as ours – this is the strangest of all. Dada’s voyages are planned down to the last detail: not just when the gods decree the time is right, but also exactly what crew, what cargo, what provisions. ‘The gods will throw us plenty of surprises along the way,’ he always says, ‘but it pleases them if we start off with care.’
Now he’s rushing, the ship barely prepared, the season not started, unknown passengers taking up good cargo room…
It takes longer to pack and ready ourselves than I expected. We’ve lived on the farm for nearly a season, and the valuables and possessions Dada’s unearthed from the house fill many baskets. Tiny and I have shaken the dust from the clothes – the fine embroidered shifts and the swallow dance fishnet shawl – that are too fine to wear here. She cries as she helps me pack; she’s been in our household since she was old enough to work, four or five years – she’s about the same age as me, though she’s still so little. But now she’s free, ready to start her new life with the goatherd, becoming a woman while I am still a maiden.