Freedom s Sisters

by Naomi Kritzer

  Before Kyros raped me, I was too young to desire anyone. In the harem, all I ever wanted was to be left alone. Now I was free. Free women could have desires of their own. They could choose, freely, to take others into their beds. I closed my eyes and tried to find that place in my own heart.

  I didn’t find anything, but eventually I drifted back to sleep.

  A rooster crowed at dawn, over and over and over. I wished someone would wring the damn bird’s neck, but the floor was too hard to sleep much longer anyway. Janiya was already up, pouring water into the pot for morning porridge. “Any ideas, now that you’ve slept?” I asked.

  “Tea first,” she said.

  Damira was out. Janiya, Alibek, and I sat down to drink tea and stare out Damira’s open front door to where chickens scratched in the dirt. “What did Damira mean yesterday?” I asked Janiya. “About the Weavers turning on you?”

  Janiya didn’t speak right away, and for a moment I thought she would refuse to answer. “You know I used to be in the Sisterhood Guard,” she said finally. “I grew up here on the muddy side of the canal, but when I was a young woman they offered me a place with them, a sword…Damira was opposed, I think you probably guessed that, but I shrugged her off and signed up.” She stared bleakly forward for a moment. A gust of wind stirred up a cloud of dust. “Is it horrible to admit that I loved it? In the same way that I love my summers with the sword sisterhood. I had a daughter, Xanthe. When she was a few years old…” Janiya sighed. “Ha. When I told Lauria about this, I said I was falsely accused, but I’ll tell you the truth.”

  I waited.

  “I stole a spell-chain. And not just any spell-chain—I stole the one that binds the great northern river. The Jaxartes.”

  “You what?” I said. “Why?”

  Alibek spoke at the same time, asking, “Why did they let you live?”

  Janiya looked down into her teacup, a faint smile on her lips. “The magia who held the golden serpent—that means, the one who was in charge, who held the symbol of power—entered a dark fever. She meant to free the river—smash the binding stones, loose the djinni in a terrible flood. She told me what she intended. I could have killed her, but that would have gone against my vows to protect the Weavers, and especially the magias. I did tell someone, but they chose not to act as quickly as I thought they needed to. I was young, arrogant—so I acted. I stole the spell-chain, to hide it. To keep it safe.”

  “Surely they didn’t want to let her break it,” I said.

  “No. In fact, after the incident, she was removed as magia. There are comfortable cages within their palace, the Koryphe, where they keep safe the sorceresses who are too disordered to be trusted, and she went to live in one of those cages.”

  “How did they catch you?” Alibek asked. “You had a spell-chain. Couldn’t you have gotten away?”

  “I had a spell-chain, but I feared to use it. Had I called on the djinni in the spell-chain to help me, they might have come—but that would have loosed the waters in precisely the cataclysmic flood I wanted to avoid. So I fled on horseback, and was found and brought back. And punished.”

  “Why?” I said. “You stole it to protect the Empire!”

  “Oh, Tamar.” Janiya eyed me. “Surely you don’t think that would excuse theft of a spell-chain. Of this spell-chain. This is the Sisterhood of Weavers we’re talking about.” She had a faint smile. She had believed they would excuse her theft. She had trusted them to trust her. “You recall that I mentioned allegiances to members of the four. It perhaps hurt my case that I had gone against my own secret allegiance, and there was no one in power to speak for me. Still, I think they did believe me. That’s why they didn’t execute me—only stripped me of my rank and freedom, took away my daughter, sent me to Casseia…”

  “How long were you a slave?” I asked.

  “Hmm. All my life, before I came to the Alashi. That’s not what you asked—I know. But it’s the true answer.”

  “Why did she want to free the river?” I asked. “I thought the river’s return would be bad for the Greeks.”

  Janiya rested her cup on the ground. “There are some who believe that Zeus is imprisoned under the reservoir where the river is bound.”

  “That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Alexander is supposed to have bound Zeus long before the reservoir was even there. And the stories all say he was imprisoned under a mountain.”

  “The reservoir is in the mountains.”

  “So the sorceress wanted to find Zeus?”

  “Yes. They say—well, you know the story, that if you free him, he’ll make you a god. The sorceress I knew believed that he would also restore her to herself. The sorceresses all know they’re mad; this one could feel the last threads of control slipping away. She was desperate.”

  The porridge was ready. Janiya spooned it into bowls, and we sat down in the shadow just inside the door where we could get a little bit of a breeze.

  “What did they do with the spell-chain after they caught you?” Alibek asked as we ate.

  “They certainly didn’t tell me,” Janiya said. “Before, it was guarded by the Sisterhood Guard, in a locked room deep under the Koryphe. After—I heard a rumor that they were going to use djinni to guard it. They can’t hide it under a mountain with Zeus, because they need to keep it close at hand. The lake waters rise over time, and have to be drained off—some of the djinni carry it places that the sorceresses find useful. Also, when a sorceress dies, her bindings weaken. The bindings on this necklace sometimes have to be remade.”

  “I bet I know where it is,” I said. “I bet it’s at the top of one of the towers. You need a djinn to get into those, right? There aren’t any stairs. You need a djinn to carry you to the top.”

  We could see some of the towers from where we sat, faint in the morning haze. Janiya stared off at them. “Maybe,” she said. “But any sorceress can get into those towers. The four don’t trust the other sorceresses any more than they trust their guards.”

  “Zivar had a locked box in the wall of her workroom,” I said. “She had a djinn guard it. Lauria told me about it. If I were one of the magias, I think I would keep it at the top of one of the towers and guard it with djinni. That would keep it safe from everyone but Lauria.”

  “But Lauria was in the Koryphe just a few days ago.”

  “Surely she was closely guarded,” I said.

  “But she got away,” Alibek said.

  Janiya stared off at the towers again, resting her spoon on the edge of her bowl. “If they do have it in one of the towers, I bet I know which one,” she said. “There’s one that’s plainer than the others. Most have carved marble blocks built into the base, but there’s one that doesn’t. It also has a larger base—plain gray rocks, cut large. It was used once to hold a prisoner.”

  “A prisoner?”

  “Before my time,” Janiya said.

  “Surely you heard stories,” Alibek said.

  Janiya thinned her lips. The barley district was waking up beyond Damira’s door. I smelled wood smoke and porridge, mixed in with dust and garbage and the faint reek of death blowing in from the collapsed temple. “Yes,” she said.

  “And…?”

  “Lauria isn’t the first person able to free djinni. There have been others. One was, hmm. Over twenty years ago. The magias kept her imprisoned in that tower.”

  “Why did they lock her up, rather than kill her?”

  “She was the daughter of one of the magias.”

  “What happened in the end?” I asked.

  “She jumped out of the tower.” Janiya set her empty bowl carefully down beside her. “And then…Well, the story said because she had opened her heart to the djinni, Hades refused to allow her into the kingdom of the dead. She stayed in the Koryphe as a ghost and wreaked all sorts of havoc. In the end, her mother had to die, as well, in order to plead her daughter’s case before Hades, and Persephone took pity on them—thinking of her own mother—and they were both allowed in. That’s th
e story I heard.”

  I shivered, despite the rising heat of the day.

  “Well,” Alibek said as we cleaned out our bowls, “I think we should do exactly as Damira suggested. We should climb to the top of the tower, steal that spell-chain, then make them think it was stolen by someone from the conspiracy of Alexander.” His voice was mocking. Of Damira, I thought—not me, for once.

  “Excellent idea,” Janiya said. “All we need is to figure out who to fix blame on.”

  “Kyros,” I said. “Surely he must be in on it. And he’s here, in Penelopeia…or he was. We could steal it and kidnap him.” I realized a moment later that my voice was far too earnest.

  Alibek turned his mocking eyes on me, but instead of cutting me he said only, “I’d rather kill the bastard than kidnap him. Couldn’t we kill him instead?”

  “No,” I said. Because if someone went looking for him in the borderland, they’d know he was dead…I shrugged back the words.

  “Hmph. Kidnapping it is, then.”

  Janiya stroked her chin. “It would probably be easier to track down Zeus, break his chains, and recruit him for our side.”

  “I don’t believe in Zeus,” I said. “But Lauria and I freed a mine full of slaves once. If we somehow got a spell-chain…”

  “Ah, yes. That would make many things easier.” Janiya stacked our bowls by the hearth and stood up. “There are, no doubt, some spell-chains buried in that rubble heap. The soldiers are watching, but smuggling a spell-chain out should be easier than scaling a tower. Shall we go dig?”

  The rubble pile looked nearly as big as it had yesterday. I wondered how long this would take, and if eventually they’d conclude that anyone underneath had to be dead and switch over to using djinni. Maybe not. By now, they were probably more interested in finding spell-chains than survivors, and djinni were nearly useless for finding things. Also, I’d heard Zivar say something once about the risk of having djinni touch karenite. Sometimes they found a gate, like the one they’d found in Lauria, and slipped away.

  We spent the morning shoveling rubble into floating wagon beds again. Then someone decided that the largest stones had to be taken out. They cleared all the people off the ruins, and two djinni were sent to pull out a couple really large blocks of marble. The sorceress watching from overhead shouted—there was a body down in the hole, where two blocks had leaned against each other. She sent her djinn down to bring the body up. The woman’s body had not a mark on it, just dirt. Then someone shouted, “She breathes!” The sorceress elbowed everyone aside and knelt by the woman, tipping water into her mouth from a waterskin.

  Alibek found me in the crowd. “Who is that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Some priestess.” If a sorceress had found herself alive under the rubble, she’d have used her spell-chains to get out.

  The sorceress who’d brought out the survivor now wanted to pull out the rest of the big rocks, to see if they found any more people alive. The officer overseeing the digging thought that was too dangerous. I sat down in the shade while they argued about what to do next. I saw the woman with Lauria’s voice, looking at the injured woman with an anguished face. I edged over to her. “Do you know her?” I asked.

  “Who? Oh, the priestess? No.” She shook her head. Her voice was still Lauria’s, but it didn’t rattle me now that I knew to expect it. “You’re the girl who ran into me yesterday, aren’t you?”

  “Yes…sorry…”

  “It’s all right. Do you suppose they’re going to send us back up?”

  “Not right away. I think the sorceress is going to win the argument.”

  I was right. I stood in line by a well to get a drink of water as the sorceress’s djinn lifted out huge blocks of stone and marble, stacking them neatly in a clear spot on the western edge of the square. “They could have the djinn rebuild the temple,” I said.

  My companion laughed darkly at that. “That’s what got them into this mess.”

  I remembered from yesterday that she knew what had caused the collapse, but I gave her a surprised look anyway, to see if she’d tell me what else she knew. She raised an eyebrow. “They had aerika holding the temple up,” she said. “Keeping the statues from toppling, the walls from tumbling, the roof from crashing down.” She picked up a loose brick, holding it out with one hand, and piled pebbles on top. “Then something loosed the aerika, and…” She let go of the brick, and it fell in a rain of pebbles. “If they’d built it properly in the first place, they wouldn’t be in this mess. Half of Penelopeia is built this way.” She looked around thoughtfully, then fell silent.

  No wonder they wanted Lauria dead.

  We reached the front of the line. I drew up the bucket. The water was shockingly cold, and I drank deeply, then passed the bucket to my companion. “What’s your name?” I asked, as we stepped aside to let the next person drink.

  “Tamar,” she said.

  “You’re the other Tamar?” I said. “I mean—my name is Tamar, too.”

  “Really?” She had started to look away, but now she turned back to take a long, careful look at me. “I think—” She broke off. “I think they’re ready to send us back up,” she finished, and hurried away, leaving me to pick up my shovel again and scramble back up on to the heap.

  We didn’t find any more survivors that afternoon, though with the big blocks moved, we did start to find bodies. My shovel hit a leg in mid-afternoon. My first thought was fear that I had hurt someone. Then I realized my shovel had sunk into the flesh like a knife into ripe fruit, and I gagged. “Body,” I said, and backed away. I remembered a moment later that I should have dug for a spell-chain, but it was too late. Others were arriving to dig out the body a rock at a time.

  The stench of dead bodies was horrible everywhere in the square, but I tasted it when I found that body. As I tried to catch my breath and not throw up, Alibek appeared beside me. “Let’s go get a drink,” he said, and led me back down to the square.

  There was still a line to drink at the well, of course, and we waited our turn. “I am weak,” I said. There were soldiers nearby, so I said no more than that. Alibek knew what I meant.

  He shrugged. “You know, it doesn’t matter. I really don’t think it does.” He jerked his head toward the soldiers, very slightly. He meant that it didn’t matter because we’d never manage to smuggle a spell-chain out.

  “You don’t know how resourceful I can be,” I said.

  “I’ve seen a fair sample.”

  “Anyway, even if it didn’t matter—I was weak. And I’ve been around death before, so why?”

  We reached the well, and took turns drinking. “Let’s sit and rest a minute,” Alibek said.

  We sat down in the shade. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Alibek said. “Normally, if you leave a body sitting out, scavengers take care of it. The scavengers can’t get to the bodies, with all the rocks here. So they rot, and overwhelm us with the smell. Don’t mourn your weakness too much. Bodies aren’t meant to sit like this. It’s not natural.”

  I thought of the shovel sliding into the thigh and tried to shake the picture out of my head. “No,” I said.

  “Are you ready to keep digging?”

  I nodded, and we went back up. I couldn’t bring myself to use the shovel, though. Instead, I picked up rocks, one at a time, and moved them, until it occurred to me that I could put my hand onto—into—one of those bodies. Fortunately, when I had that thought, it was almost sunset. I slid down from the pile, got my rice, and headed for the canal.

  “Hey,” Alibek said, and fell into step beside me. “We should walk slowly tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “Janiya left a little early, did you notice? I think she’d like some privacy.”

  “Oh,” I said, and blushed. I hadn’t noticed.

  “I can’t believe you’re blushing. What kind of former concubine is embarrassed at the thought of someone having sex?”

  “Don’t say that,” I hissed, and lo
oked around to see if anyone had heard. No one was close enough. “We’re not among friends here, remember.”

  “No one’s listening. Let’s cross the canal and go for a walk.”

  We scrambled across the canal, then walked along the bank. I still had my rice tucked under one arm. I wondered how long we needed to leave Janiya and Damira alone—I was hungry. In the warm evening, the canal stink hovered in the air, but it was nearly wholesome compared to the dead-body smell of the temple square.

  “Did you ever take a lover?” Alibek asked as we walked. “Back, you know. Did you ever have a lover you chose?”

  “One of the other concubines, you mean?”

  “Or another slave. Or a Greek, even, if it was your choice, not theirs.”

  “No,” I said. “When I had the choice—any choice—what I wanted was not to be touched. By anyone. Some of the others did, though. Why do you ask? Did you ever have one?”

  “Yes, one time. One of the other young men.”

  “You wanted a man? I’d have thought—well, you know, just for the variety, if nothing else.”

  “I know, and there was actually a woman concubine…but I didn’t trust her reasons, so I said no.”

  “I haven’t had anyone touch me that way in a long time.”

  “Since the harem?”

  I shook my head. “There was one time, after we escaped. We saw some bandits…Lauria told me they couldn’t be Alashi, but I didn’t believe her. Anyway, I decided to take a look on my own, and they saw me.”

  “Bandits.”

  “Yeah, the real kind.” I forced out an awful-sounding laugh. I wondered why I could talk about the harem easily now, but not this. “When Lauria and I escaped, I kind of forced her to take me with her. So when the bandits caught me, I figured, that was it. I had defied Lauria and gotten myself captured—she wasn’t going to help me. So I made the best of it. I pretended I was one of the girls who liked—you know the type. I figured they might not watch me as closely if they thought I wanted to be there. It didn’t work.”

  “How did you get away?”