by Melanie Rawn
“Have you any questions?”
She doesn’t move. She hardly dares to breathe.
“Come now, Natasha. I know you understand me.”
She says nothing. She doesn’t even blink.
He smiles again. “Enjoy the books,” he murmurs, and leaves her alone.
That’s when she sees it: the book she picked out the night before, left open and face-down on the arm of the easy chair. Of all the languages represented—German, French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Greek—she had chosen one in English.
Dragon Ships, by H. Elizabeth McClure.
With an intriguing title and a beguiling tale of a world a thousand years gone, a woman she has never heard of has betrayed her.
THERE IS NOTHING to do except read. She reads voraciously—only in English—and almost every day there are new books waiting beside her door. They’ve tried to trick her by including things in Russian and French, but she separates those out and puts them aside, taking only the English books.
The ten girls have their meals together. After the first few days, nobody bothers to talk to Natasha. She still has not uttered a single word, a single sound. She has not yet conceded that she must communicate with anyone—not even the tall, elegant man who knows that she knows English.
At the top of the house, at the very back, there is a little balcony. It is the only place where fresh air is to be had. The window of her room is sealed shut, though sunlight enters freely through clear panes of glass. The balcony, with its wrought-iron chair and soft cushions, is hers for a half hour every day. She is left alone. The balcony is enclosed in chicken wire; she assumes that at some point in the past, someone jumped. From what she can see of the brick walkway below, escape could not have been the result—but then, perhaps it was not meant to be.
In a room down the hall are two stationary bicycles and two treadmills. The first few moments of the daily hour in the little gymnasium are a scramble for the bikes; no one likes the treadmills. After a few days, a sign-up sheet is posted that makes sure everyone has a fair turn.
In June she undergoes the procedure for the first time. She knows enough to know what they are trying to do. It is not a success; she bleeds as usual two weeks later. In July they try again. This time she doesn’t bleed on schedule. She feels . . . odd. Not sick to her stomach, not dizzy, not any of the signs she has heard about. Just . . . odd. They begin to watch her. Three other girls are also being watched. By the last week in August, they have bled again.
Natasha has not.
SHE WAKES TO A DIM roaring sound that comes closer and closer as the minutes pass and she lies there in bed, trying to understand the noise. Gradually, as a composer might layer instruments and phrases beneath and on top of each other to create an ever-more-complex piece, other noises are added: the creaking and banging of wood, the scraping and whining of metal, the rasping of concrete and the smashing of glass. The lashing of the rain seems almost calm by comparison. The air becomes dense, thick, almost too heavy to breathe. It smells strange—as if it has escaped from some deep fetid hole in the earth. It is tremendously hot; she realizes there is no more muted whoosh of air conditioning, and the lazy rotations of the ceiling fan have stopped.
She gets out of bed in the darkness, makes her way to the window, parts the curtains. She watches for a long while as the rain beats against the glass. Slowly there comes a little light, and she can see beyond the window. The world is painted in grays and browns, as if the air itself has been bruised.
“Stand away!”
She spins around as the tall man shouts at her from the doorway. For the first time he does not seem in control of everything; he is barely controlling himself, she thinks, for his hands look a little trembly and his face is flushed.
“Natasha!” he snaps. “Move back!”
She pretends not to understand. It is the same game they have played for months now. He strides over and hauls her away by one elbow. He pushes her onto the bed and she is suddenly, irrationally terrified. The fear seeps through her like poison, hot and shivering through her belly and thighs. But he turns for the closet, pulls out clothing, and throws it at her. She doesn’t move because she truly can’t.
He grasps her shoulders in his big, thick fingers. “Dress yourself. Keep away from the window. I know you understand, so do as I tell you. Now! Or I’ll leave you here!”
But he won’t. She knows that. Everyone has been far too careful of her, now that she is pregnant. She will not be abandoned. The fear washes out of her. She takes off her nightgown—she has long since shed modesty, there have been too many people who have seen her too intimately naked—and pulls on a shirt and jeans. As he hovers in her doorway, calling orders down the hall, she sits on her bed to pull on socks and shoes. The wind and the rain shriek, and her window explodes inward.
BY LATE AFTERNOON, the worst has passed. But then the water begins to rise.
It is slow and inexorable and it is worrying these men who thought that a few broken windows would be the extent of the damage. There has been argument all afternoon among them as they sit in the horrid gold-curtained room. Some want to load up the cars and the van, find safe ground, wait out the storm. Others scoff, saying that the levees will hold—and if they leave here, how will they keep track of their whores?
“I paid good money for these bitches—of both sexes,” one man snarls. “I’m not losing a single damn one of them!”
“And what happens when the police come by again?” another man asks. “There was a mandatory evacuation order that you ignored—”
“They’ll probably be tired, and needin’ a little relaxation. I’ve had twenty houses in nine cities in four countries, and all cops are the same. You pay them, mostly in freebies—” He gestures with his cigar to the nearest cluster of girls. “—and they protect you. The ones who want money, unless they got a sick mother or they’re saving up for a new boat, their buddies call ’em queers. So the payoffs usually don’t cost a thing.”
“I get it,” another man says impatiently. “But why worry about escapes? They don’t speak no English. They got no ID—”
“Because it disrespects me! If these little whores even begin to think they could get away from me—” He glares across the room and the whores shudder.
At irregular intervals the argument continues. Natasha is puzzled, not sure why the tall man, who seems to her so much in authority, does not simply give the order that will load them all into cars and take them away from here. There are things she does not know, of course, and they are unlikely to tell her, so she gives a mental shrug and curls deeper into the corner chair. The other nine special girls are talking quietly with each other, inspecting their fingernails, fiddling with their silver bracelets. They take no notice of the whores. These cluster together, clinging to each other. They sit in dull-eyed silence, and flinch at sudden noises.
It is dreadfully hot and humid. She wishes she had something to read, something to take her mind and imagination far away from here. She has read so much in the last months that she is beginning to think in English. She wonders idly how many words she will mispronounce for never having heard them aloud. She should have indicated weeks ago that she wanted a dictionary—
“Scheiss!” The tall man is on his feet, pointing at the water seeping from the hallway rug onto the hardwood floor.
There is no more discussion.
The tall man fixes his gaze on Natasha and is about to say something when there is a pounding at the door and someone yells, “Anybody in there? Department of Wildlife and Fisheries—we’ve got boats, come on!”
One of the men begins to laugh, a high note of frenzy in his voice as he says, “Wildlife? By damn, now that’s funny!”
The door is kicked open. Water gushes in. Three young black men slog their way into the house. Their faces are tense, but their voices are kind and reassuring. Soon Natasha is crowded onto the porch. The house next door, lacking so lofty a stance, is awash to the windows.
S
omeone is lifting her in his arms. She is told, “It’s okay, chère, you be safe in no time.” She is put into a boat that reminds her a little of the scafisti in Italy. The tall man is arguing with someone wearing a green nylon jacket with some kind of logo on the breast. His pale eyes widen as the motor is gunned and the little rubber boat chugs off down the river that was once a street.
Natasha watches him until she can see him no more. Very quietly, she laughs.
THE SHELTER is in a home more or less undamaged by the hurricane. There is bottled water, sandwiches, cookies. And cots. Natasha eats, lies down, sleeps for many hours. She wakes up smiling.
“Yes, honey, you’re safe now,” murmurs a soft voice, and she opens her eyes to see a caring coffee-brown face. “Your friend Marika says your name is Natasha. That’s awful pretty. My name’s Poppy.”
There is something watchful about the dark eyes that puts her on the alert. But in the next moment she realizes there is nothing malignant about this woman, nothing that wants to take and own and use. There is concern, curiosity. And some sort of knowledge that she can’t identify. Best to stay silent.
“Miz Bellew?”
Poppy turns her head. “Miz Lachaille,” she acknowledges as a young, weary-looking white woman approaches.
“This the little girl you were lookin’ for?”
Natasha feels her blood freeze solid in her veins.
“This one and these other poor children. You know what the one of them said about that house they were in, don’t you?”
The second woman nods, her lips compressing into a thin line of disgust. “Don’t take much English to communicate that. Will y’all be takin’ them with you?”
“I hope to do that, yes, if they want to come. Virginia’s a long ways—but I can’t imagine they’d mind being as far from here as they can get.”
“Amen to that. Well, let me know when you decide to head out—we’ll load up some food for your trip.”
“Thank you so very kindly, Miz Lachaille.” When the woman has gone, Poppy says softly, “Child, I’ll be honest with you. I did come lookin’ for you in particular. Sensed you halfway across New Orleans. You don’t know why, I’m sure. But you have nothing to fear anymore. I can help you. Do you believe me?”
Natasha looks at her with the empty expression perfected these last months. It has worked with everyone but the tall man. It does not work with this woman, either.
“You have a secretive face, and there’s quite a lot you’re hiding behind those lovely blue eyes, but the air around you tells the truth. I’m no expert in that kind of reading, but I know enough to know you can understand me. If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine. I propose to take you and your friends back home with me to Virginia, where the people who kept you will never find you. Once you’re there, you can decide what you want to do next—go back to your home, stay in this country, whatever it is you want to do. You’ll make the decision. You’ll decide if you trust me.”
Against everything she’d learned since waking up in the blacked-out upstairs room in Budapest, she does trust this woman. Something stirs inside her, vaguely recognized from odd, isolated instances in the past—things she can’t remember with any real clarity, the way images in dreams are vivid one instant and mist the next. But it is something, it is familiar, and it makes her trust this woman.
At length she gives a short, sharp nod.
“Good girl.” Poppy smiles and gets to her feet, chair scraping the concrete floor. “You just rest, honey, and when we’re ready to leave I’ll come get you. All right?”
She doesn’t respond again—after so long forbidding response in the muscle and skin that could betray her with a movement or a flush of color, she cannot release control so quickly. But Poppy only smiles again, and walks away.
THE WHOLE WORLD is a soggy mess. It takes hours to drive past the debris strewn through every street—trees, cars, bits of houses, furniture that floated out and flowed along with the water and then sank into the sucking mud. At last the car reaches an area looking slightly less like a war zone.
Poppy hasn’t said much. She has the radio on, listening to news reports. Everyone is angry. The incompetence of the government is the only topic. People are being blamed and other people are defending them, and themselves, and quite often the “discussions” become shouting matches. At this point Poppy usually changes the channel. There are appeals for food, clothing, water; phone numbers and addresses are recited; people read out lists of names of missing persons. Natasha finds it interesting, in a remote way, that Americans are so eager to help, rushing to give money and collect clothing and offer shelter to total strangers. To other Americans. Not to her.
The other passengers are silent. Natasha recognizes them. Marika is “special,” like her; the other girl and the boy are whores from downstairs. She doesn’t know and doesn’t care if they understand enough English to follow the news on the radio. The hours pass, the sunlight dims, and Poppy pulls the car into a lot with a sign that says REST STOP. She points to the bathrooms as she begins talking into a cell phone.
Natasha thinks for a moment about slipping away. That Poppy doesn’t accompany them to the bathroom means she trusts them to return—or perhaps she simply knows that they have no other choices, nowhere to go. But Natasha speaks English. She might be able to—
There is a smear of blood on her underpants. She takes them off, puts them in the metal box labeled DISPOSAL, and walks back to the car.
She is half-dozing in the darkness when she feels a sharp cramp in her abdomen. Someone on the radio is complaining again about feemuh. Natasha sits very still and stares unblinking into the swath of road illuminated by the headlights, bordered by metal railings and languid trees. When the pain returns, her whole body clenches.
Glaring headlights shine directly into her face, startling her. Poppy pounds a fist onto the horn, hits the brakes, wrenches the steering wheel, loses control of the car. It slews toward the metal barricade, smashes, skids sideways, skitters to a stop. Poppy curses furiously. One of the girls in the back seat is crying in huge terrified sobs.
The seat belt traps her. She struggles to find the release catch, and her stomach cramps again.
“You idiot!” Poppy yells out the open window. “You ran me off the road!”
“My apologies.” He leans down, and all his white teeth are shining as he smiles. “Hello, Natasha.”
She feels a warm gush of liquid between her legs.
Poppy’s breath catches. “You know this girl? How do you—”
“Now, madam, if you—” He falters, and suddenly looks at Poppy as if he recognizes her. “Ah! No wonder you found her. You will be so good as to restore to me my property.”
“Your ‘property’?”
“I know what you are. I know how you found her. And now I will take her back.” He gestures with one thick-fingered hand. “It’s a strange location, this. Here for a very long time, invisible except to those with capacity to see.”
All at once Poppy mutters something under her breath, and her right hand rises from the steering wheel to trace a brief pattern in the air.
“No, do not trouble yourself. It will not work here. Can’t you feel it? The power that prevents power’s use. Someone was creative, and deeply skilled.”
“How did you find her?” Poppy asks, her fingers stealthy, sliding toward the door handle. “How did you get ahead of us?”
“You stopped, and made a phone call. I must ask you to stay still. Put both hands on the wheel. Marika, get the other girl and that boy out of the car. Carefully.”
It hurts now. It hurts very much. In a blackened haze spiked with acid, it hurts.
“Slowly now, Natasha,” he says, and she flinches, for he is right next to her, leaning in the open car door. “I found her the same way you did,” he tells Poppy, flicking a finger against the dangling silver disk of the bracelet.
Poppy looks startled, then shaken—and then she says with terrible contempt, “You�
�re a parasite. You have nothing of your own, so you—”
“Enough,” he says softly. “Enough.”
It is the last thing she hears before the pain overwhelms her.
Three days later, she wakes up in Virginia.
IT’S A STUPID BOOK.
The others—about Viking conquests, a queen who stitched an endless tapestry, a poet, an artist, the mistress of a king—were interesting at least for the history. This one drones on and on. France is always cold and rainy, Palestine is always hot and sandy. Guillaume keeps galloping his horse into battle and waving his sword at Saracens and whining about Elisabeth. Elisabeth is forever tending her castle and fending off suitors and whining about Guillaume.
A very stupid book.
But she has folded the last load of sheets and pillowcases, bedspreads and towels, and she has nothing else to do.
She thinks for a moment about sneaking down the stairs, just for a change of scenery. But in the last weeks she has grown so big and so ungainly that it’s a chore just to walk down the hall to the therapy room. She hasn’t been on any floor but this one, in fact, for five months—not officially, anyway.
A few days after she woke up here, he took her down the stairs to sit on a footstool with a screen on her lap, and made her watch while a girl spent an hour with a man in a bed. In all this time, from Hungary to Albania to Italy to Mexico to New Orleans to Virginia, she has never watched the act. He did not allow her to look away, his fingers like thick claws at the back of her neck. She watched as the girl’s mouth gaped wide and the man filled it. She saw the man’s face contort as he shouted the name of the Son of God, over and over and over again.