That was where Mam found me.
I didn’t cry over Kaja then. Nor did I cry when I was carried home and fed and put to bed. Or, hours later, when I woke to find Mam and the mayor and, while the medic extracted a festering bullet from my leg, had to explain to them that Kaja had burned down Feversham Station, that Kaja had saved everyone.
I didn’t cry in the days that followed. Numbness had a chokehold on me. I thought again and again of how Kaja’s last moments might’ve gone. Had her kind heart grieved what she’d been about to do to the faithful? Had she been afraid? Had the parson’s guard found her; had he tried to stop her; had he hurt her before the fire consumed them? Hundreds of possibilities, none of them peaceful.
I didn’t cry when I confessed to Mam about the baby, though Mam cried. I wanted to go back to Feversham, to see if I could find anything of Kaja, and I swore at Mam and Aunt C when they told me I wasn’t in any condition to. Aunt C went instead, and reported back that Feversham was rubble.
Aunt C brought back a fragile bundle of ashes. They couldn’t have been Kaja—it was probable they were a mix of Feversham and dead faithful—yet we buried it next to Nana and Aunt P. Mam asked me did I want to say anything. I shook my head, and stayed stony, and afterwards I felt more like a coward than I ever had.
The power was out for three months before New Creemore got connected to another facility to the south. Lining up for hot water, I heard one of the Pollock girls complain that the power being out was the fault of that Kaja Zawisza, and though I was seven months pregnant, I clocked her in the jaw so hard her teeth rattled.
Shortly after that, Mam and I had to go to Kaja’s rooms to clear them out. Mam did most of it, since I was more waddling than walking then, but I packed up Kaja’s books and swept her floor and folded her clothes. In her closets, I found dozens of items she’d sewn. A few were in Kaja’s size, but most were tiny, warm, sturdy. Clothes for children. Many I recognized as having been made from things I’d brought to Kaja: a pair of trousers made from a red denim jacket I’d taken from a faithful, a collared dress made from a dusty ream of green velvet I’d found in the ruins of a store.
I didn’t cry over Kaja, not until I imagined her lonely hands making all those things.
My baby was born in the winter. A girl, like me, born red-faced, black-haired and squalling. Mam and Aunt C proclaimed her a true Zawisza.
Of course, I named her Kaja.
I hope she grows old.
FIERCE WOMEN IN HISTORY BY
MELANIE R. MEADORS
HARRIET TUBMAN
ESCAPING FROM SLAVERY IN THE 1800s southern United States was considered nothing short of miraculous. Slavery was considered a business investment; the livelihoods of plantation owners—and some would argue the very way of antebellum Southern life—depended on it. Slaves were guarded closely to protect against their loss. If a slave escaped, but then was captured, they were often used as examples to show other slaves what would happen to them should they try to escape. They were subjected to horrific punishments and deaths.
Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland around 1820. When she was a teenager, her master threw a heavy object and hit Tubman in the head. She suffered a traumatic head injury as a result, which gave her spells of hallucinations, dizziness, and vivid dreams throughout her life. Nevertheless, in 1849, Tubman managed the all but impossible task of escaping from her master in Maryland and fled to Philadelphia.
Most slaves who ran considered themselves supremely lucky to survive and stayed in the safety of the North. And who could blame them? They were fortunate enough to survive a first escape. To return South for any reason would have been equal to a suicide mission. Yet that is exactly what Harriet Tubman did.
She returned to Maryland to help free her family. Then she went back to free other slaves, one small group at a time, over about thirteen missions. Every time she returned South, she carried the same risk as she did escaping for the first time. Yet every time, she escaped again, leading more and more slaves to their freedom, and even helping them find work once they reached their destinations.
During the Civil War, Tubman joined the Union Army as a scout and spy, and was the first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war. She guided a raid that freed more than seven hundred slaves.
Even after the war, into old age, Tubman never stopped fighting for freedom and equality, and was a strong voice for the women’s suffrage movement.
Further Reading:
http://www.harriet-tubman.org
Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom by Catherine Clinton
CASTING ON
PHILIPPA BALLANTINE
ELLEN FOUND THE BODY.
Or, rather, it was her toe that found his leg sprawled out between the bookshelves. She windmilled her arms, trying to keep from tumbling over. At her age, an unexpected fall came with its own set of risks that she’d rather not encounter. Still, she looked better than he did.
The other women of the Doumount knitting circle quickly rushed to her aid. Catelyn and Sophie heard her gasp, and both being younger, got there first. Rose and Molly followed at a slower pace, clutching each other as they peered down the aisle with startled eyes.
Ellen was hardly surprised to see Rose’s glasses were in danger of slipping off her nose, and Molly’s wig off her head. It didn’t take much to undo them these days—not that she was much of an improvement.
Still, the young man was worth getting in a fluster about, even in Ellen’s jaded opinion. His dark hair was wildly tousled, but as he was face down, it was hard to judge much else about him. He was sprawled under one of the poorly patched sections of the library roof where the bombardment last summer had struck. Sometimes water would leak in, but so far, no young men had.
She heard Rose draw her breath in over her teeth. They all had lost men in the war, but she was the only one who still had two sons who had not been listed as Missing or Killed in Action. The dead man was not Tommy or Jeremy though; they both had bright blonde heads.
Illustration by M. WAYNE MILLER
“Who is it?” Molly said, being so short she had to push to see past her friends.
“A young man, but a stranger,” Rose whispered in a tone that might be used when finding a bomb, even though she was stating the obvious.
The women all shared a glance that combined equal measures of hope and terror. Ellen, despite her aching bones, was the first to reach down and check if he was alive. As a young woman, she’d been a nurse in the last war, and she tried to recall her training while searching for a pulse. It fluttered against her fingertips, but she couldn’t decide if she should be happy about that or not.
“He’s alive,” she pronounced, “but he is most definitely shot.” Pulling up his jacket and shirt, she found a bullet had punctured his belly.
Catelyn pressed a hand to her lips, as her words came bubbling out. “That’s not our side’s uniform.”
In the flickering light of the single oil lamp suspended above them, that much was apparent. The Glorious Commander’s troops wore a smart tan uniform with dark brown belts and epaulets—or at least they had in the early days of the war. The man currently laid out in their little library wore what had once been pale blue cloak but was now tattered and covered in soot. That could only mean one thing.
“A magician, then,” Molly said, leaning on one of the shelves and adjusting her wig. Back in the days before the war, her friend had many fine wigs, but the one currently nesting on her head was almost as threadbare as the rug their circle set their chairs on.
“Well we can’t just leave him lying here,” Rose said, and she had to be thinking of her own boys, even if this man was from the other side. The women stared at each other. Ellen didn’t have to say it. They all knew the price for harboring an enemy combatant, let alone a magician.
Despite his injuries, the man might overhear them, so Ellen jerked her head and led them back to the circle of chairs and their abandoned work. The windows were covered with newspaper, but one h
ad peeled away at the corner so that the night sky twinkled at them. Though there was no moon tonight, they had dared three small oil lamps to light their covert knitting.
“What do we do?” Sophie pushed her curly dark hair out of her eyes, and looked around to the other women. The young woman said little, but concern was etched in her face. For a brief second, Ellen wished she was a hugger. Yet if she did it now all her friends would know how truly awful the situation was.
Already Catelyn was rubbing the purple scarf she was working on between her fingers. They all shared who their secret projects were for, and Catelyn’s was for her daughter Joanne who had been taken by soldiers in the spring.
All of the knitters had stolen tiny scraps of wool from the Doumount mill they worked in during the day. They all knew the price of stealing from the war effort was flogging, but they still did it. Ellen was proud of all of them, for keeping the secret and the circle together.
Most of them were making scarves, but Sophie made socks. Her husband might have been gobbled up by the war, but she had two young children to feed and keep warm.
Rose adjusted her glasses and glanced over her shoulder. “Well… what would they do…if they found him here?”
Ellen took a ragged breath and glanced around at the tiny library. Once it had been the center of Doumount, but now its roof was near to falling in, and its books out of order, damaged or lost. Molly had been the village librarian back in its heyday, but those times seemed as far away as a myth. She’d been stronger back then, healthier too. However, as it stood a little apart from the main square, it had been spared the majority of the deadly bombing raids.
Now, it was a tiny pool of relative normalcy for the five of them, since no one else really came into the library anymore. People had far graver things to deal with. No one wanted to read about things they could not have. Instead of reading, the women knitted, and talked in low voices, and tried to pretend none of the horrors of the recent war had happened.
Catelyn cleared her throat. “We all know what they would do: burn the place down with him and us in it.”
It would have felt like a threat only a year ago, Ellen realized, but at this point in the war it didn’t seem too terrible of a thing. Each of the five of them had seen worse.
Ellen’s throat tightened. Perhaps she presumed too much. Sophie had her two young children, Catelyn still had hope of seeing her daughter again, and even Rose and Molly had each other. Maybe she was the only one without anything to care about.
Rose gave a shrug of her narrow shoulders. “I never understood why we had to have another war with Mensognes. You know, when I was a little girl, they never bothered with us. Sometimes I would climb the oak in the village square and I could see—”
“Don’t get lost in the past,” Molly said, her eyes darting to Rose with a hint of sharpness. “We have the here and now to deal with and that is plenty!”
As if on cue, from back in the shelves the young man let out a groan. Ellen and all the other knitters sat taller in their chairs, and all conversation ceased for a long moment.
“That’s it then,” Molly said, her fingers tightening on the back of her chair, “we can’t just leave him there all by himself, magician or not.”
Molly, as per usual, had a point. The young man was not going to go away, either as a patient or a corpse. They had to deal with him.
That was indeed it. Ellen let out a sigh, hustled back to the shelves, and got down on her knees—some feat for a woman of her age. She could feel more of her old nursing habits kicking back in as she examined him more thoroughly. “Yes, there we are, a bullet to the abdomen.” She felt around some more, and found the exit wound. When she withdrew her hands, they were covered in his blood, but these women had ceased to be shocked by anything. “I won’t know how bad it is until we get him to my house,” she told them.
“Your house…” Sophie spoke, her gaze leaping up from the floor where it usually resided to collide with Ellen’s. “Isn’t that… dangerous?”
She had the good grace to blush as she said those words, and then she waved her hands in front of her face. “Forget I said it—of course it is. Everything is.”
“I’m too old to care,” Ellen said standing up, and rubbing the blood off her hands and onto her once fine skirt, “but I shouldn’t speak for you, Sophie…Catelyn…”
The younger women glanced at each other, but Ellen knew it was Sophie who had the most to lose. Catelyn’s Joanna was not in the house, her husband was in the army somewhere, but Sophie was an entirely different story. She had two young children to protect.
Her chin tilted up, and her green eyes regained—even if it was for just an instant—a portion of their old sparkle. In reply, she strode over to one of the collapsed shelves. It was covered in a few bricks and torn up books, but she soon shook the shelf loose.
“He’s thin. We can carry him on this,” she said. “Give me a hand, Catelyn.”
The two younger women maneuvered the make-shift stretcher over to the young man, and with some awkward shuffling managed to lie it just above his head.
Ellen pressed Rose into holding the bandages tight over his wound, as the other four pulled him as gently as they could manage onto the stretcher. Despite all that, he let out a strangled scream and jerked in their hold. They might not know his name, but Ellen was sure all of them had the same reaction; he could have been one of their loved ones.
The women and their village had suffered a great deal—little food, military stationed down the road, long hours at the mill, and a series of bombardments from the airships of the resistance—but they had never seen the full extent of the war. Ellen had lost her whole family, sons and grandsons, and while the rest of the circle had suffered the same, they had never seen the direct results of it on a young man before.
However, one thing still remained close to their minds. Before they set off, Rose tidied up their knitting bags, stuffing them under a loose board beneath the window. It would not do to save the magician only to be caught for wool theft.
They hoisted the patient carefully up between them and set off. Luckily, it was windy outside, so the noise covered their scuttle from the library to Ellen’s home. The residents of the village were under blackout conditions, but it wasn’t as if they had much oil to burn in the lamps anyway. Most people had given up taking any notice of their neighbors’ activities.
Catelyn and Sophie took front and back. Rose and Ellen trotted as best they could on each side of the patient, while Molly went ahead to open the door to Ellen’s home.
Fortunately, it was the closest home to the library. Once it had been a beautiful white stone building, bursting with flowers in the front garden, but the war had taken a toll on it, too. The time for flowers had long passed, leaving only the time for weeds.
The white stone was reduced to a smeared gray color that was a result of the clouds of soot that emanated from the machines of war. Ellen, despite herself, always flinched when she approached her own home. She’d once been so house-proud; even her own sons had been afraid to come in with muddy boots. Now, she would have gladly let them enter, in whatever state they were.
She flinched. That wound was too fresh—she had to concentrate on the one in front of her.
Finally, they managed to get the man into the house, and Molly closed the door tightly before pulling the thin curtains shut. Sophia and Catelyn laid the patient on the table. Though the outside was wrecked by the war, the inside of Ellen’s house was immaculate. She scrubbed the table, now marked by blood, with sand every morning, but it mattered little today.
“Help me cut his shirt off,” she demanded of no one in particular.
Sophie found the fabric shears and quickly did as demanded. All of the women—except seasoned Ellen—let out a gasp.
It was not the amount of blood that shocked them—there had been plenty of that around over the years, but the faint green glow emanating from his body. It had the appearance of mist.
“
What is that?” Catelyn asked, leaning forward.
It was Molly that pushed her back. “Aether,” she replied, her face folding in disgust. “They use it in all the weapons meant for the magicians these days.”
“Terrible stuff,” Ellen said. She had already pulled out her nursing bag from under the sink. “I have a tin of activated charcoal that should fix that. Stole it last year from the factory for Molly’s stomach problems. Now let me have some room, please.”
They took the hint. Pulling their knitting from its hiding spot, Catelyn, Molly, and Rose settled around the hearth. Sophie stoked the fire against the wintery chill, but stayed nearby Ellen to offer help. The normalcy of the click of their needles and their low conversation steadied the former-nurse’s hand. Something she was honestly worried about.
The firelight and a lone tiny oil lamp was all she had to work by. All the while she mumbled under her breath. It was a remarkably clean wound that seemed to have, by some miracle, missed his organs.
Ellen cleaned the wound, stitched him back up, and then eased herself upright. Letting out a long, pained sigh, she went to scrub her hands in the sink. When she turned around, wiping her palms on her apron, she couldn’t help the tiny smile on her lips.
“I think we’ve stolen one back from the god of death, ladies.”
Though there were no great cheers, the women of the circle looked up from their work and smiled. For a moment, Ellen felt a tiny glimmer of hope—an odd sensation that hadn’t touched her in years.
Then, Molly spoke up. “Well, that’s all well and fine…but what now? The constabulary will know they brought one down, and sure as eggs, they’ll be looking for him.”
It wasn’t that they were afraid of death—they had all been in dangerous situations before—it was just there were more terrible things than that.
“It’s the whole village that is in danger too,” Rose said, carefully taking off her glasses and cleaning them on her sleeve. “If they knew we had concealed him, it would be one thing, but now we’ve healed him…”
Hath No Fury Page 8