by Wendy Orr
We trudge on, heading east into the sun until the purple stink fades enough that we can breathe. Maybe this isn’t a bad job after all.
Suddenly the taller boy, whose right foot twists in at a funny angle, grunts and points. Vultures are circling, flapping down to something on the ground. The children are almost running towards it. Running towards a vulture! Are they crazy?
‘Stop!’ I shout. Pignose said follow the vultures – not fight with them!
I’ve never been so close to one. Their heads are white but their bodies glow red in the dim sun, as if their chests are smeared with blood. Stories tell of them snatching babies from parents to feed to their own young, and I wonder if it’s only babies – their black wings spread wider than Dada’s arms.
But the children don’t care that they’re barely as tall as the birds. They pick up branches and whirl them over their heads, racing shrieking towards whatever is lying on the ground. The birds flap away, one of them carrying a long bloody bone.
Whatever it used to be – a goat or an ibex, I hope – has been dead for longer than I can guess. Up close, it stinks nearly as disgusting as the purple works. The children dash in to cram lumps of putrid flesh into their baskets. Turning, they stare and wait for me to do the same.
That’s what we’re here for: collect rotten meat to bait the traps. Just do it.
I’m not touching it.
I find a rock to scrape it up with, lean over the remains – and vomit.
The children laugh so hard I’m surprised they don’t throw up too.
Now the smell of my own vomit is added to the stench of rot. The sight of it makes me gag, but I try again, poking flesh onto my rock with a stick. The children think this is even funnier than vomiting onto it, but eventually I manage to fill my baskets – without ever touching the rottenness or being sick again.
The baskets are heavy; we walk back slowly, the smell growing again as we draw closer. I was wrong about the dead smell in the hills being as bad as this. Nothing stinks like this. I start towards the gates but the children shake their heads violently, grunting in fear.
Fear is what it means to be a slave. I don’t know what the punishment would be for walking into the works, like I thought I was supposed to, instead of following the children down to the beach. I don’t have to know – I’ve already caught their fear.
Out in the deeper waters of the cove, divers jump off small fishers’ boats. Just when I’m sure they must have drowned, they burst up again, clinging to the side with one hand and passing the end of a rope to the fisher on board. The diver catches his breath as the fisher hauls, shoves the dripping basket-trap onto the boat, and dives again.
Sometimes the trap slips off the boat and sinks like a stone – a real stone, not a floating bone of a dead island – trailing its rope behind it. One young fisher boy catches the rope when that happens and is pulled overboard with it. The older men know to wait for the diver to bring it up again, though one overbalances as he helps haul the trap on board, and the little boat flips upside-down, throwing out its cargo of full traps as well as the men. Two other divers swim over to help; the boat is shoved right way up, and the fisher scrambles back on board, splashing water out with his hands. The divers disappear into the sea to find the ropes and start hauling the traps up again.
As the boats return to shore, the divers haul their traps onto the beach and start sorting the contents. Eels and a few small fish are kept aside to be cooked and eaten, and finally the murex shellfish – the reason for all this activity as well as the stink – are thrown into baskets to be taken up to the works where they can be turned into precious purple dye. I expect them to be purple, but their heavy whorled shells are mud coloured, and the meat inside is the brown of most shell creatures.
A piercing scream. A diver clearing a trap is writhing on the shore.
‘Scorpion fish!’ The shout is echoed around the beach as the other divers race to him.
I point my fingers against evil. I remember Dada in the sea god’s beautiful shrine room, talking to Mama when they didn’t know I was listening, still a child too young to know that grown-ups could cry. ‘These evil fish look like stones,’ he’d said. ‘One of my young sailors stepped on one when he jumped off the ship to haul her in. The pain was fast but the death was slow, and such agony he begged me to kill him. To my shame, I couldn’t.’
Mama murmured something I couldn’t hear, but Dada was louder.
‘I swore to the gods that if it happened again, I’d have the courage and face their consequences.’
The divers are keening as if the bitten man is already dead, but one bends over him, ear to lips and they all pause to listen. One by one, they touch his forehead and then their own hearts, and the keening changes to a hymn I’ve never heard.
God of the cove, father of the deep,
guardian of creatures
who swim and crawl
giving their lives
to bring life and death,
we praise your bounty
and offer one of our own,
freed now from slave life.
God of the cove, take him,
free him from pain.
God of the cove, keep him,
in your home in the deep.
God of the cove, spare us
that we can worship you more.
The bitten diver’s arm is red and swollen to the shoulder; his screams crescendo and subside. Still singing, four men lift his writhing body gently onto a boat and push it out to sea. Two climb on with him, one to hold him steady and the other to paddle. The other divers and fishers – everyone on the beach except the three children and me, and the pig-nosed overseer striding down from the works – take their boats and paddle out in a procession behind them.
Like a funeral procession – except he’s not dead.
We can still hear the singing when they reach the rougher water where the cove meets the wider harbour. The men’s forms are blurred as they slide the diver into the sea, but his thrashing and struggles are clear. They sing as they return too, but not so loudly. Most are weeping.
‘What are you waiting for?’ snaps Pignose.
Face of a pig, soul of a vulture.
The sun is past its peak as we hand over our baskets; the divers drop stinking bits of rotten ibex into the empty traps, and head back out on their little boats to lay the traps again. We pick up their baskets of fresh murex, carry them up to the works and dump them into big pots with a pitcher of sea water.
A gong sounds.
‘Food!’ says the little girl.
It’s the only clear word I’ve heard any of the children say.
The food is a sort of fish and sea-greens stew of every edible thing caught in the traps, and the remains of the big murex when their dye gland has been pulled out. The overwhelming stink has invaded my mouth and tongue as well as my nose, so I have no idea what this tastes like, but it is hot and filling.
The children slip away. I’m just wondering where we rest for the siesta, when the overseer bellows at me. ‘Over here, Not-a-Priestess!’
He thinks that’s funny. I won’t show him I care.
He points me to a group of people sitting on a flat stone around a pot of murex. ‘Show her what to do,’ he orders.
A one-eyed man dumps the shellfish out of the pot, and hands me a rock.
‘Smash the little ones and throw them back into the pot,’ says a girl, not much older than me. In fact, no one is much older than me. I don’t think there’s a person in the works over twenty summers, not even Pignose.
I pound and pound before I figure out that only the smallest shells can be smashed. If they’re even as long as my thumb the only way to get the dye is by hammering a bronze pin through the side and wiggling the mucky grey gland out through the hole – without pricking yourself with the pin. The hammerers’ fingers are quick and skilled, but they are also bruised and bloody, and most have missing fingernails.
I’m too lowly to be trusted
with a pin. My fingers are scratched and sore, but by the end of the day, when the pot is full of thick purple sludge, I still have my fingernails.
The fish stew is served again at sunset. I gulp mine down, and refill the bowl for Mama and Nunu. The cook lets me light a branch at the fire, and with that in one hand and the stew in the other, I head the long way back across the hills. I am so tired I can hardly walk.
Nunu and Mama burst into tears when they see me. ‘Oh, my child!’ says Nunu, as if she’s speaking for them both.
She’s definitely speaking for them both when she adds, ‘Your mother needs you to leave your shift outside for the night. We’ll hang it over the thorn bush to air – I don’t think even a wolf will take it!’
She wraps me in my cloak as I strip off, and takes my stinky shift outside. I stink too, but I’m asleep before they finish eating their stew.
And I leave again in the morning before Mama wakes.
*
I don’t know how I’ve offended the gods
to make them hate me like this
but I must have done something –
or not done something I should –
because the life I’m living
is nearer death than life.
My spirit wanders,
not caring if it’s lost as Mama’s
and never finds my body –
this body that lives in muck
hammering with rocks and bruised fingers,
this body that stumbles in sleep
trudging home to its mama
who cries at its stink.
But Nunu has earned the fishers’ trust,
cares for babies while mothers work,
helps tend the injured and ill,
with Mama by her side
or wandering, watched by all.
The fishers feed them as their own –
they don’t need the stew I carry,
earned with such pain.
Chance finds his own feed,
guards Mama and Nunu at night
and no longer howls when I leave.
Do they even miss me
the nights it seems easier
to sleep on the slave floor,
knowing I will never be free?
Some days I hear Pellie,
more real than grunting children
or frightened slaves;
more real than me.
She scolds and teases
that her friend is not destined
for a purple life –
she doesn’t say whether
the purple is priesthood or slavery –
and how can she know?
She hasn’t choked on this stink,
hasn’t felt the blow
of a stick on her back
for falling asleep as she works,
hasn’t pounded her fingers
with a hammer of rock,
hasn’t tripped and fallen on a path at night
and lain there till dawn
because her legs won’t move.
And if Pellie knows
how long I’ve been here,
she doesn’t tell me,
though another full moon comes;
maybe another –
and still I don’t bleed.
I know now
I’ll never be a true woman.
But this morning her voice is clear
through the crash of hammers:
‘The goddess calls; Nunu needs you.
You must see your mama.’
‘You’re not an oracle!’ I snap –
One-Eye hears me
but doesn’t care if I’m crazy
as long as I smash my shells.
When the night stew is eaten
I cross the hills
to do what my friend says.
The wailing reaches me far from our hut:
Mama’s high, Nunu’s deeper,
lu-lu-lu-ing the grief of broken hearts –
I don’t know how many times
a heart can break.
‘Traders came today,’ Nunu weeps.
‘The tall goldsmith from our town
is travelling with them,
searching for a place to work his craft.
He said that when the great mother’s belching
had the stink of death
and steam was hissing from her home,
he and as many as could fit
left on the other ships
the dawn before the war of the gods.
‘What the sailors said is true:
it was our island torn apart,
her heartland scattered
and all souls on her
swallowed in fire and ash.’
‘No!’ I scream,
and again like Mama,
‘No, no, no!
The sailors said
there was no town or harbour
on the island that died!’
‘The earthmother’s fire
spewed rock and ash
from the depths of her belly –
our town and its harbour
are buried deep
under a mountain.’
Nunu’s words come through a haze. I can’t seem to hear them, and when I do hear, I can’t understand. This is too huge, too impossible, to be true – and I am too black and empty inside to feel anything at all. Something in me is broken and will never be right.
Mama doesn’t need to understand words. She wails in pure grief. Nunu is crushed and pale; her face twists as she repeats the goldsmith’s words, as if she’s reliving the horror of his memories herself. Her story is incoherent with sobs. Maybe his was too.
A sudden thought, like a flash of light through my darkness: The goldsmith said everyone who could fit was on that ship: Pellie’s nearby! That’s why I’ve been hearing her in my head!
‘Where are the Lady and her family now?’
‘The Lady said the ship must wait till the next dawn, for the rituals of sailing season. The captain was like your dada – he knew they couldn’t wait.’
‘The Swallow Clan didn’t board?’ I hear my voice, a whisper in the distance. ‘None of them?’
Nunu shakes her head. ‘None, nor my family neither. Goldsmiths and jewellers is all; and the sailors and their families.’
‘But it doesn’t mean they died! They’d have fled to the hills and farms again. They’re safe on the other side of the mountain, Nunu, I know they are!’
‘No one was safe.’ Her voice drops to a whisper, as if she’s afraid of her own words. ‘The goldsmith’s skin is scarred by the rain of embers, far out to sea though they were. Fire and rock poured onto the island and the sea around it. Boats burned on the waves. There are mountains now where once were fields; cliffs where once was shore. Nothing lives – the island is gone, child, as sure as if it’s sunk under the sea.’
My mind is blacker than the night around us –
this time the truth won’t be pushed away.
I told Pellie she was no oracle
but perhaps she is,
her spirit voice in my head
all of her that is left.
And still my mind screams
because how can Pellie,
all of her family,
Ibi’s wife and his baby,
the farmers who cared for us –
everyone we’ve ever known –
be gone as if
they never were?
I can’t believe it
and I won’t.
Mama and Nunu sob through the night,
but it seems that I slept
because Nunu is shaking me awake
and I run stumbling
through a morning grey as my soul
for the headcount at dawn.
I know now why slaves don’t speak –
there are no words
for the loss of all hope,
for a life without joy
that is no life at all.
I
move through the day
of gathering rot
and hammering shells
and if I could feel
I would be one of the creatures
crushed between rocks –
but I cannot even feel pain.
Though I’m wrong that slaves can’t feel –
there is a ripple, almost of joy,
when the overseer with his cruel pig face
says that midsummer comes tomorrow
and the Lady has declared
that even the slaves –
no-good and lazy as we are, he adds –
will honour the great mother
and the sun still pale from the war of gods;
call them to strength on this longest day –
though the priest-folk,
processing in purple,
don’t want the stink of the slaves who made it
so we will honour her here
with what song and praise
such lowly creatures can offer.
Pellie’s voice says clear:
‘A day of song and praise
will have no headcount,’
so I stumble home again at dusk.
I have no plan,
but Pellie does.
It feels so good to wake next to Mama and know that I don’t have to return to the purple works for a day, that I snuggle against her like a child. But Mama moans in her sleep and I don’t need Pellie’s voice to tell me to wash. I rescue my stinking shift from its thorn bush outside our door – Nunu was right, no human or animal has ever tried to steal it – and pull it on to go down to our secluded beach.
Mama and Nunu have been invited to honour the fishers’ goddess with them, but Pellie has other plans for me.
The morning is warming already, though the water is still cold at first step. I pull off my shift and drop it into the shallows; wade out further.
‘Undo your plait and get your head under the water!’ orders Pellie.
If she wasn’t a spirit I’d argue back. But she is, so I duck under and splutter up, splashing and scrubbing, over and over, letting my ponytail and forelock float free. The sea warms around me, holding and rocking, washing me clean; my body relaxes as if it doesn’t know that nothing will ever melt the frozen blackness inside. Lights dance on the water as the sun struggles to rise from behind the hills to the east, far beyond the purple works. I sing the dawn, alone out here in the water, though from beyond the point I can hear the fishers singing their own song, Mama and Nunu with them.