Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 11, Issue 6

by Deborah Biancotti

  ‘And then what?’ I say. ‘I get up to the ship and… ?’

  ‘I don’t know, Soon-ei.’ Efran winces. ‘You’ll have to work that out yourselves.’

  It’s clever, using the plural like that. It makes me feel like maybe I won’t be alone. Maybe I will take the girl.

  Maybe I’ll trade up once I get there.

  ‘Okay, Efran.’ I lay a hand on his knee. ‘I’m going now.’

  Efran doesn’t respond. It’s not because he’s dead: his chest is still moving up and down regularly. I think it’s because he doesn’t want to say good-bye.

  I squeeze around Hubert’s body and stand tall outside the cave. The ship sits above me, a smooth scab in the grey sky. I turn back to Hubert and try to drag him off the cave opening. I figure Efran doesn’t need the last thing he sees to be Hubert’s stupid face. But Hubert’s too heavy. I have to leave him.

  I go in search of the last little girl in the world.

  Burning the Lady’s Bones

  Thoraiya Dyer

  The first time Natan squeezed into the edges of her life, Giya was still a girl.

  ‘The winter flame,’ Natan said, scowling, ‘is a waste of fuel.’

  Giya and her little brothers gazed up from the circle where they sat cross-legged around the clay firebowl, feeding seed pods in to make it green. Long ago, ribbons of emerald flame in the night sky had guided the impulsive and light-footed Lady back to her children, bringing the sun. That was before the islands had slipped north like limpets, into a shorter lasting but more velvet dark.

  And so they lit fires for her to find them, or so Giya’s father said.

  ‘The Lady provided the whale from whence the oil came,’ her father said now, unperturbed. ‘It would be mean-spirited not to thank her.’

  ‘There is no Lady,’ Natan said. ‘We have no spirits with which to be generous or mean. The Fifth Book teaches us to trust only the evidence of our senses and our logic, and that we must do as a consensus, lest one person’s senses be faulty.’

  ‘The consensus around this fire is that the Lady be praised. Good solstice to you, Natan.’

  Natan stared at Giya. She stared back at him with dislike, wishing he would go while her father was still being polite to him. He had a thin face like a bald bandicoot and huge cockle-shell knuckles. The women in the rendering sheds whispered that Natan had shown no aptitude as apprentice whaler, warrior or blacksmith, and in desperation his father had offloaded him onto the priests of the newly formed Tomanite Temple.

  The Tomanites did not tattoo their faces in search of the Lady’s Blessing. Giya thought that was a pity. It meant that Natan’s skinny face would stay pale and ugly forever.

  ‘Your daughter’s hair is very long,’ Natan said. ‘Strong, thick and shiny. A sign of good health. I’ll gladly take her from you when she’s of age.’

  ‘No. My daughter will be a whaler’s wife.’

  Giya sat up straight and looked at her father curiously. She had not known that before. How could she not know something so important?

  ‘You’ll change your mind,’ Natan said. ‘There are marvels being made in the Temple. Things you can’t imagine. There’ll be no need for whales when the lands of the Tall People are ours. We’ll have houses of wood. We’ll burn wood, when we wish it.’

  Giya was shocked. Wood was the Lady’s bones. When the Lady saw that the people needed some, she plucked out some of her ribs and sent them on the tide.

  ‘Good solstice to you, Natan.’

  When Natan was gone, Giya put another seed pod in the fire. If that man stayed around their fire too long, probably the Lady would turn her back on them in disgust, never opening her Right Eye, the sun, ever again.

  ‘Bless us,’ she said softly. ‘Bless us, Lady.’

  The whitish flame that rose from the cloth wick was shot through with green for a fleeting moment. The crescent moon that was the Lady’s all-but-shuttered Left Eye peered over Horned Turtle Mountain. Giya breathed in the whale oil smoke and asked,

  ‘Wouldn’t burning the Lady’s bones make her angry, Papa?’

  But her father was too distracted to reply.

  The second time Natan came, Giya was fourteen. Of age.

  It was her father’s funeral and his furs were turned inside out, the protective embroidery revealed.

  Through her tears Giya noticed the crudeness of her mother’s designs, the faded colours and the clumsiness of the stitches. Since the Temple took over the reading of law, the girls were not taught the symbols to invoke the Lady’s Blessing, any more than the boys were tattooed. The priests called it harmful superstition, and yet—

  And yet.

  Giya’s father had been killed by a whale.

  On the inside of his possum-fur coat, the tattered threads forming the shape of the whale were unravelled. As though the stitching must fail before the great beast could turn on him.

  ‘I’ve asked the head whaler,’ Natan said, creeping up on her from behind. ‘He’s responsible for you, now. He says you’re free to come with me whenever you want, when you’ve finished grieving. They’ll marry us in the Temple.’

  ‘Go away,’ Giya cried. ‘I don’t want you. Leave me alone!’

  ‘Still grieving, I see,’ Natan said. ‘You’ll change your mind. I’m learning to read and write. When the priests see fit, I’ll go to the capital and copy the Fifth Book. Then I’ll bring it back here to our Temple. Everyone will want me to marry their daughters. We’ve never had a copy of a Book here before.’

  Giya wished he would go to Terash immediately and never return. Before she could tell him so, the men started making eerie whalesong on their bone flutes and pushed her father’s body on its carved block of ice out to sea.

  Gulls and skuas circled it in grey and white helices. The Lady looked down on the funeral berg with the cold circle of her Right Eye.

  ‘What are you doing, Giya?’ her little brothers asked a year later when their fur cloaks went missing.

  She had been to see Vissa, the mother of the Chief, and begged to be shown the shapes and the makings of the Lady’s Blessings.

  ‘Keeping you safe,’ she replied, and as it was summer, night did not fall. Her brothers went away to sleep in the menhome. Giya worked through until morning. When they returned, she wouldn’t let them watch her stitch patterns of clouds and gulls and the half-lidded Left Eye of the Lady into the inside of their cloaks, because the making was only for women to see.

  They marvelled when she was finished, though, and brought her their trousers when she asked.

  The third time Natan came, Giya was well grown.

  She stood at the Horned Turtle Tablelands, a mesh bag slung over her shoulder and digging tools in her hand.

  For a long while, she simply watched the patterns of the melting snow and breathed the briny peat-smell of the bog beneath. Giya had come for the tiny, insectivorous sundews whose subterranean tubers yielded tiny amounts of brilliant red dye, perfect for the crimson heads of Culwinnan cockatoos in a midsummer pattern for her youngest brother, now a warrior, in a time of iron sleds that burned their trails across acres of snow and firesticks that spat lead balls from their stumpy muzzles. The Lady’s Blessing seemed more important to Giya than ever before.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Natan demanded. ‘Those tubers are poison.’

  ‘I’m making ink,’ Giya replied, ‘for colouring thread.’

  ‘Oh. In the Temple, there’s no need for me to make my own inks. I don’t have time.’

  Giya stood and turned to him with a look of disdain. He was a full priest now, and more, his boots and leathers studded with rare metals. Giya could not see beyond his greedy, stupid face, though. If only he could have hidden it behind the Lady’s Blessing. Instead, he’d banned others from wearing the honours he would never earn, saying they were an affront to Toman’s memory.

  Toman had died a hundred years ago, so there were none alive who remembered him, but Giya felt certain that Toman, a Chief’s son, wo
uld have been tattooed within an inch of his life.

  ‘If you’re so busy, why have you followed me here?’

  ‘I’m getting married. Three wives, I’m taking to the Temple. Toman’s will was that those of superior intellect produce as many offspring as possible, so that one day we may venture behind the stars.’

  ‘And what’s behind the stars, Natan?’ Giya grunted, squatting again and digging in a different spot, careful to leave enough in each place to regenerate. ‘It’s this world that the Lady has given us for safekeeping.’

  ‘Your blasphemy does not enter my ears. I just wanted you to know that it is too late for you. My wives are chosen.’

  Giya would have laughed if she hadn’t been too busy digging.

  When she stopped to rest and saw that Natan still stood there, red-faced, she said quickly, to get rid of him,

  ‘I wish you happiness.’

  But when her brothers came back from yet another battle with the Tall Tribe, she wished she had poisoned Natan instead. For her youngest brother had died in the fighting at Hillcrown. It transpired that though Giya’s people, the Pale Tribe, held Toman’s Third and Fifth Books of Conversations With the Traveller, which described advanced alchemy and philosophy, the Tall Tribe had come to possess a Book of their own.

  Nobody knew how the Traveller’s engineering codex had fallen into their hands, but their stone and mortar fortifications were of a kind that the Pale Tribe could never have imagined. All the oil-burning sleds and lead shot in the world could not bring down gates that blocked out the sun.

  Giya’s brother died of an arrow in his neck. That was all. The archer was unseen, stationed within the very walls.

  Worse, he had been hastily buried in the ground. There was no reversal of his clothing, no sea burial, no ceremony.

  Giya wept to think of his spirit wandering through underground caves and abandoned kolopsis dens, unable to follow the Lady’s reflection in the water to her spirit-home in the sky.

  When Natan came again, it wasn’t to offer condolences, but to prohibit her embroidery.

  Giya industriously carved at fresh whale blubber, one in a long line of women butchering, preparing the fat to be frozen in the underground stores. Dreams of occupying the lands of the Tall Tribe were only partially realised, for although the Tall Tribe warriors were confined to their fortress towns by day, unable to prevent the Pale Tribe from poaching their lumber and crops, they exacted vengeful raids by night.

  Maids shrank back from their bloody work as Natan passed, bowing their heads; it was practically unheard of for men to enter the rendering sheds and yet here he was, poking his pale, pinched face where it was not welcome.

  ‘What is it that you need, Natan?’ Giya asked, her knife poised over her basket, deliberately failing to give him his correct honorific.

  ‘I’m here to tell you to stop stitching blasphemous signs into the men’s clothing. It weakens their determination. It leads to irrational fears and disobedience.’

  ‘I am not married. My brothers are dead. Whose clothes do you imagine I will embroider?’

  ‘You teach the young women. You make the thread and the colours. You must stop.’

  ‘And if I do not?’

  ‘You will be made to,’ Natan said.

  When he was gone, the older women shared significant glances. Then they silently took up their work.

  Giya did not stop teaching the young women.

  She hung out her threads to dry by moonlight, and it was by moonlight that Natan caught her, despite the blankets she’d hung about her wood fire to hide the light.

  ‘I told you long ago that there would be wood to burn,’ he said.

  Natan’s voice issued from the darkness. Giya, her night vision ruined by the fire, backed away from the sound of him until her back touched one of the drying racks. He had two warriors with him. Their clubs were carved with symbols that Giya didn’t recognise.

  She frowned.

  ‘Do you seek the Lady’s Blessing on your weapons?’

  ‘Those are not superstitious scrawls like the ones you use,’ Natan said contemptuously. ‘They are words. Toman’s words. Only men can read them. Look.’

  He took a book from a finely tooled satchel. Three of the round, medallion-like symbols were pressed in gold onto the front cover. They were elegant. Like maps of the constellations enclosed in perfect circles.

  It was the first book Giya had ever seen.

  ‘Why only men?’

  ‘Because you women are superstitious! You are stupid! You didn’t listen when I told you to stop making mischief with your witchcraft!’

  But what she heard was his true reason: You didn’t listen when I told you to be my wife. And as he wrenched her rainbows of threads from the racks and ground them in the dirt under his heels, she became furious beyond reason, remembering how he had put her brothers under the ground.

  She lunged at his turned back, pulled the book out from under his arm and threw it on the fire. It fell open. A web of glowing lines spread over the fluttering pages; a heartbeat later the islands between them darkened to black before flying away in a thousand wind-borne feathers of ash.

  Natan whipped around. His eyes bulged out of his head. He screamed.

  ‘I will have you put to death,’ he said when he could speak again. ‘To destroy the word of Toman is to destroy the foundation of all our lives.’

  ‘We lived here for thousands of years before Toman was born,’ Giya said, but she was too shocked by her own impulsive action to resist the warrior priests when they seized her.

  No sooner had they reached the Temple than they ran into difficulty, as Natan had planned to lock her in a prison cell and yet the cells lay beneath the Temple and according to the new law, no woman was permitted to pass through the fern-carved doors into the hall that had once hosted women’s ceremonies.

  Instead, Natan roused Elne, wife of the Chief of the Tribe, and demanded that she take Giya into custody in her home.

  ‘For what crime?’ Elne asked gravely.

  ‘As we have never carried the words of Toman before now,’ Natan said, ‘we have never needed a name for the crime of their destruction.’

  ‘The words remain,’ Giya said. ‘It was a copy. Only a copy. I have not harmed the true Fifth Book.’

  ‘Burning the sacred words in whatever form they take is no different to burning the Fifth Book itself. It is a symbol of wilful ignorance. A rebellion against the holy struggle to reach the heavens.’

  ‘What is going on here?’ demanded the gravelly voice of the Chief. Giya saw Elne sigh softly to herself and knew that it was too late. Elne had no power in her husband’s presence.

  ‘You will burn,’ Natan told Giya. ‘I will see to it. You will burn.’

  They built her pyre from elixirleaf logs.

  Nobody from the Pale Tribe had been executed in such a way before. Giya listened to the men argue about how much wood was required and whether it was dry enough to burn. Beneath the white feather cloak of the condemned, she breathed in the sweet smell of the sap and the ranker stench of whale oil which had been splashed over the wood just in case.

  She thought of her brothers who had died attempting to annexe the forests of the north, and her father who had died hunting whales, and the combination seemed fitting, even if her spirit might be left wandering inconsolably.

  But she hoped that would not be the case. Three moons had passed since her confinement; three months in which Toman and the other priests had argued about the retrospective new law.

  Now it was winter solstice. She herself would be an offering to the Lady on the winter flame.

  ‘Remove her garments,’ Natan ordered.

  Elne met Giya’s eyes and smiled comfortingly as she stepped forward to remove the snowy hood and robes. Giya had not been permitted to wear her own clothes underneath, lest she embroider something blasphemous on the inside of them. The village women had all taken turns sitting with Giya inside Elne’s whalebone dwelling.


  They had brought her their embroidery needles, though she had no thread. They had brought her lanterns with soot inside them, and fresh coconut oil from Sett, for which they had ceased to barter decades ago when facial tattooing was banned.

  Elne was the wife of the Chief, however, and she had not forgotten the technique, having marked her husband with her own hand when he killed his first enemy in combat.

  When Giya’s body was revealed, there was a collective gasp, as every inch of it was covered in tattoos of the circular symbols Giya remembered from the cover of Natan’s book.

  ‘They can never be removed,’ she said steadily. ‘Nor can you flay me without splitting them apart. Whoever harms me breaks the new law. Whoever lights this fire must join me on it.’

  Natan’s pupils were black holes of rage.

  ‘Words,’ he cried, ‘from the hand of a woman!’

  ‘Toman was only a scribe,’ Giya said. ‘The Book is the recorded word of the Traveller, and the Traveller was a woman.’

  ‘The Traveller was not human. It had no human flesh. You. You have polluted—’

  ‘Will you not take me into your Temple now, Natan? Will you not caress me, as you caressed the pages—’

  ‘No!’

  Natan seized the firebrand from the warrior priest who had been slowly edging away from the pyre. He leaped up onto the wood pile with Giya, so that they were face to face, and dropped the brand at their feet.

  ‘Your hair is very long,’ he whispered.

  ‘Bless us,’ Giya murmured. ‘Bless us, Lady.’

  The flames leaped up around them.

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