by Wendy Orr
Last night it was too dark to see the beach and the houses near it; this morning we walked on the cliff path and I’d been thinking too hard to look around me.
Now I’m looking. Now I understand why they have guards at the gates; why they give only one day’s rations to the homeless; why everyone is scared. It’s not that it’s so different to what we saw at Tarmara, but some horrors are fresh every time you see them.
From the beach to the centre of the town, the ground is littered with wreckage – fragments of houses, pieces of boats, bits of I don’t know what. And it’s not just wood: stones have been rolled away from walls, tossed onto other walls. Chunks of pumice are scattered on top of everything else, with sand, dead fish and seaweed. It seems that while the ashes of the destroyed island were flying through the air, the bottom of the sea was being vomited across the land.
If I live to be a great-great-grandmother, the oldest crone that has ever lived, I hope to never see a battle of the gods again.
But even though we can smell bonfires, and a stink of rotting sea creatures, there’s no stench of dead animals or bodies like the miasma that hung over Tarmara. Maybe not so many died – or they have been buried or burned already. Maybe that’s why the people of Gournia, although they’re frightened, haven’t rioted like the inhabitants of Tarmara.
One thing is for sure: there’s a lot of work to do. And the time spent trapped in our goddess-shaken house, as well as the months on the farm, taught me that I’m strong. Even if I don’t have great skills, I can lift and carry.
We start trying to help. I join a group of women hauling debris out of the ruins of a house, and they shout at me as if I’m going to steal these scraps of walls. A group of fishers collecting blocks of the floating pumice rocks are so shocked and confused when we try to help that their leader finally shoos us away. We try out our new story, but they don’t seem to understand it and if they do, they don’t believe it. The fishers’ accent is much stronger than the craft-folk’s, and we don’t understand them much either.
After a while we give up, and they ignore us. They don’t want us there but they don’t chase us away, and they don’t even mind Chance – we’re nothing to them. Maybe they think Nunu and I have lost our spirits too, because Mama is not the only broken person on the beach. Many people are weeping quietly as they work; a young woman is standing waist-deep in the sea, screaming; an older man with a great scar across his forehead keeps going through the stack of salvage and laying it out across the beach. People mutter as they stack it up again and carry it up to safety, but no one shouts at him, or at the screaming woman in the sea – or at Mama chanting an endless ‘no, no, no.’
But nothings don’t get food and shelter; somehow we need to find our own. We need to survive before we can worry about belonging.
‘We’ll shelter for siesta, then go back to the town,’ I say. ‘We gave up too quickly – there must be something we can do there.’
Towns are safer. Towns are what we know.
And the town holds Andras, the only person who’s been kind to us.
‘I could be a potter’s apprentice, like his cousin,’ I say. The idea has been growing inside me, like a seed sprouting in a dark cupboard, and it feels like the first happy thought since the gods fought.
Nunu sniffs. I know that sniff. It means, you don’t know anything!
‘I have to do something, Nunu!’
But Nunu bursts into tears. ‘This is all wrong!’ she sobs. ‘Your mama’s spirit still wandering, you trying to work like a slave…and people saying the goddess has swallowed our home!’
It was better when I thought the sniff meant that I was wrong, and not the world.
‘They’re lying!’ I insist. ‘You heard the sailors in Tarmara – the island that died didn’t even have a town! It can’t be ours. But for now…you know I always loved visiting your family’s workshop. We’ll be safe if I become an apprentice.’
Nunu sniffs again and wipes her nose on her arm. ‘You could have made a much better jug than this,’ she says, and almost smiles.
For a moment it all seems easy. We’ll find Andras and ask him to send us to the potter. We will sleep and eat with the other apprentices; I’ll learn to make pots, beautiful pots, and when Dada returns I’ll have a whole new supply of trade goods that I’ve made myself.
But the guard at the gate is the grumpy captain from the night before.
‘The chief said we can enter the town,’ I tell him.
‘Do you have a house to stay in?’
He knows we don’t. I shake my head.
‘Then you’re within the walls only during the day. No beggars in the square overnight.’
‘We’re not beggars!’ I snap, at the same moment that Nunu says, ‘Goddess mercy, man, at least let us in to fill our waterjug. It’s nowhere near nightfall.’
Dogbreath smirks with satisfaction at making us beg. ‘You go, old one. These two and the dog stay outside to make sure you come back.’
Hope disappears as fast as a frightened hare. Or maybe I’m the disappearing hare. I’m certainly frightened enough.
There’s no point in asking if we can see Andras. He can’t help us now. No one can.
We wait for Nunu to return with the precious jug of water, then go back to the ruin where we spent last night.
It’s on a small point, with shrubby trees and prickly plants growing up through the floors that the ancients walked. A white cliff slopes steeply to the water, just on the edge of the fishers’ beach. The fishers don’t like us, but I don’t think they’ll harm us. That’s the good part about being a nothing. On the other side of the bay, on the next point, is the stink of the purple village – the purple works, Andras called it.
But tonight the breeze is blowing from the west, blowing the smell away from us.
Inside, by a gap under a rock, is a snakeskin. This has been a good and maybe holy place: the house snake, the spirit of this home, is still here.
So I sing to the gods, pour a libation of fresh water from our ugly jug, and scatter a pinch of our dried chickpeas at the door. ‘Goddess of this point,’ I beg, ‘allow us to make a home here and honour the spirits of this place.’
A feather drifts down. I look up to see three eagles circling.
Even Mama stands still, hand on heart in reverence until they disappear. The gods have given us permission to stay.
The fishers wouldn’t let us help them, but they’d showed us what we had to do.
We eat our last barley cakes, Mama and I have a drink of water – ‘I drank at the well,’ says Nunu – then we cross to the cliff.
Just below is a ledge scattered with red, black and grey pumice, the strange floating stones that the fishers are collecting to mend their houses. That’s what we’re going to do too.
Nunu agrees but Chance doesn’t. He barks frantically, darting at me and nipping my hands when I scramble over the edge of the cliff. I’d tie him up if we hadn’t lost his cord.
Ignoring him, I choose the first rock – a red one, as big as I can hold. Nunu starts to follow me, but this time I think Chance is right:
‘I’ll pass them up to you!’
Nunu lies down, and when she finally inches right to the edge of the cliff, grumbling all the way, manages to take the rock from me. Then Mama, as if her wandering spirit has been touched by the gods’ eagles, takes the rock from Nunu and carries it to the ruin.
The rocks are light but the work is hard, and I don’t want to be on the cliff when the sun disappears. I clamber back up: ‘Yes, yes!’ says Mama, patting my face and showing me her pile of rocks. Chance throws himself at me, licking my face and hands with relief that I’m alive.
Nunu takes a bit longer to get to her feet and walk, stiff-legged and rubbing her back, over to the pile. I haul Chance back before he can jump at her and knock her down again.
The pile is as high as my waist, and as round as it’s high. If Mama had put it next to a wall it could have been useful where it was.
But she didn’t, so we start stacking them to make two more walls to enclose the corner. My hands are scratched and sore before we start, bleeding when we stop – and we’ve only finished the pile, not the walls. It’s easy enough to put them on the bottom, but it gets harder and harder to balance them with each layer. Still, even if each wall doesn’t go much past my knees, we’ve got four of them, with a narrow space for a door.
Mama has given up helping. She sits in the corner watching us and smoothing the ground around her. Last night we were too tired and worried even to do that, so maybe she knows what she’s doing; it’s hard to tell. She shoves twigs and stones against the wall, pats the dirt smooth with her hands. One stone seems to please her. It’s shaped like an ibis egg cut in half, the smooth, rounded side fitting neatly into the palm of her hand.
Ibis egg! I’m drooling at the thought.
‘Good girl,’ says Nunu, holding out her hand. ‘Give it to me.’
Mama makes a face but obeys.
‘It’s a tool from the Old Ones,’ says Nunu, showing me the chipped edge. ‘The goddess is thanking us for that dagger – she’s given your mama a knife.’
‘It’s a strange knife,’ I say doubtfully. I’m still angry about the palace taking our beautiful bronze dagger and giving us a handful of barley cakes in return.
‘Or an axe,’ says Nunu. ‘I don’t know what the Old Ones called it, but it’ll cut branches to make a roof for this hut.’
I take the rock out to the bushes to try it in the last evening light. I hammer and saw, but what works best is to chew away at the branch with the tool’s serrated edge till it’s weak enough to break. Nunu helps me drag the branches back. We can make a roof with them later, when our walls are higher, but for tonight we shove them into the ground at the door and around the walls, a dark filigree as the red light of the setting sun glows through them. Then darkness comes and we huddle together again, one cloak on the bottom and the other on top, and sleep, waking to twitch at noises then sleep again, on and off till sunrise. Chance mightn’t be old enough to defeat bandits, but his warmth is comforting beside me.
Dreams of a house
built of Mama’s bones
glued with tears –
though I see my Mama-child sleeping
curled safe on the floor
while Nunu weeps and guards
so I must build around them –
my bone-bricks tumble
and I grab and replace them
with bleeding hands.
Waking sobbing
because it seems the floating stones –
red, black and grey like the cliffs of our home –
are bones of the great mother,
and this dream is telling me
what I don’t want to know.
But in the hard-working days,
it’s easy to shove
the dream from my mind.
I walk to town each morning
like a peasant girl, to fill our ugly jug,
because I am the strongest
and it no longer matters
who’s mistress or slave –
and because I would burst
if I never saw anyone except Nunu and Mama.
The other girls at the well
are too busy chatting to bother with me –
though they look me up and down –
but Andras smiles,
asks where we’re living
and if we’ve found work –
we all know that work means food.
‘The fishers are bringing in fish again,’ he says –
though why would they feed us
when they have barely enough
for themselves?
But, as I step carefully home –
the walk is too far
to spill precious water –
I wonder if Andras is saying
that we could fish too.
I wish I’d spied
on the boys in their Learning –
my own Dada teaching them to fish
and why couldn’t he have taken me!
Just for fun, just in case,
because you never know
when you might lose everything
you’ve ever known.
And though I’ve watched the little boats
in our harbour,
it was never important to see
how they flicked their lines or nets,
or reeled in their catch.
Mama’s muttering crossly,
thinking I don’t understand
how hungry she is,
as she follows me to the fishers’ beach
so I can watch and learn.
A few brave fishers are out on their boats
but many have lost them –
they wade to their waists
in the sea that’s taken their homes and living,
bending and scooping,
a patient dance with glistening nets;
my heart dances too
when I see fish leaping silver inside –
I know the fish are dying
but the fishers will live
and if I can learn, so will we.
On the littered shore,
others scavenge sad remains –
a cry of joy at a paddle undamaged
under the rubble of houses –
and under that, a net.
The woman lifts it,
examines;
hugs it to her like a long-lost child –
a fishing net is not quick to weave
and the maker knows it for her own.
Through my hopeless thought
of how could we ever find or make one
flashes an image, silver as leaping fish,
of Mama bending and swooping
in the swallow dance with her fishnet shawl.
I whisper my plan to Nunu. ‘But Mama will cry,’ I say.
‘Better than dying,’ says Nunu, taking the shawl from my mother’s shoulders. ‘Time to wash it,’ she says, in her no-arguing voice, and Mama nods obediently.
But sometimes Mama forgets that we don’t have slaves and servants to do the work for us. She looks around the naked fishers on the beach, as if asking where the washing girls are.
‘I’ll take it to them,’ I say quickly.
Mama raises a disapproving eyebrow, just the way she used to – and I can’t help it, I’m laughing. We haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday, we’re sleeping in a ruin with no roof – our whole world is broken and lost – but my mother is worrying about why the washing girls haven’t appeared. For that tiny moment, I’m out of time, the way Pellie and I used to be when we laughed until our knees were weak and our eyes were leaking. I remember the feeling of clinging to each other, our heads bumping with the force of our giggles, and the more our mothers raised their eyebrows, the harder we laughed. For an even tinier moment, I can feel Pellie here with me now.
Maybe she’s laughing at home, and thinking of me. When we meet again we’ll say, ‘Do you remember a day in spring when you started laughing for no reason, the way we did when we were children?’ And that will make us laugh and cling to each other again, even though we’ll be women by then.
But if I’m going to live long enough to be a woman, right now I need to play with the boys’ Learning, and catch us a fish.
I head around the point with the fishnet shawl, away from Mama’s disapproving eyebrow and the fishers’ eyes. Chance stares in shock for a full two heartbeats, his head tilted on one side because he’s forgotten ever hearing me laugh, and then bounds after me. I’m glad.
I untie my skirt, pull my nightshift over my head, and step naked into the sea. The cold water makes me gasp. I wade out deeper, till the water’s as high as my chest, while Chance races up and down the beach, barking for me to come back. After a while he gives up and starts sniffing for anything to eat. He’s not fussy about how long things have been dead.
The fishers’ bendin
g and scooping dance isn’t as easy as it looks. No matter how I hold the net, it keeps floating to the surface; I bend deeper and splash stinging water into my eyes. I step back – my foot slides on something, the sand gives way, and I’m falling backwards, sitting on the seabed with my head under water, scrambling up coughing, spluttering, spitting out the taste of sea…
I can’t give up.
I find a firmer footing. It feels safer with the sea lapping no higher than my waist, and I can pull the net lower through the water without getting my face wet. Though sometimes I splash myself to cool off – the water doesn’t feel so cold now I’ve fallen in, and the sun is warm behind the haze. My body settles into the rhythm of bending to pull the net through the water, scooping it up, starting again…
And now I’m pulling it up and there’s a little silver fish inside, and I’m so surprised I almost let go of the net. But I don’t. I pull it in tight, and the little fish is mine.
‘Mama!’ I shout – I don’t care about the disapproving eyebrow anymore. ‘I’ve caught a fish!’
I’m wading to shore as Mama and Nunu come around the point, and Mama starts no, no, no-ing at the sight of her daughter coming out of the water as naked as a fisher, until she sees what I’m carrying. ‘Fish!’ she shrieks, her first word finally making sense. ‘Fish, fish, fish!’
I want to hand it to her, this amazing gift, but the tiny fish slips from the net and flops on the sand until Nunu hits it with a rock.
‘Fish!’ Mama exclaims again – and grabs it and eats it. It’s very little. Two bites and it’s gone – Mama is spitting out sand and saying, ‘fish, fish?’ in a way that obviously means, more, more!
I go back out, and before the sun is high I’ve caught enough for us all to eat. We’ve each eaten two before I remember to thank the fish for giving their lives, so I sing a long prayer, praising the goddess for how wonderful a small raw fish can taste, wet and salty as the sea itself.
But after the first two, I think longingly of the smoky crispness of the fish Cook Maid used to serve us at home.
If only the fish could have cooked in the sun as easily as I did. My back and shoulders are red as a painted boy’s, and sting where my shift touches them. I’m so thirsty I drained the last of our jug, and feel like crying to think I’ll have to walk all the way back to the well for more.