“We’re being punished,” he said. “That’s what this whole raid was about. Punishment.”
Mami nodded. “But no more so than others.”
“Our neighbors will likely blame it on us or people like us. The go-our-own-way sort.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Am I wrong? Will our neighbors just shrug this off? This collective warning, this, this big, ugly reminder of the Temple’s reach?”
Mami hugged the baskets tighter. They’d been my grandmother’s, she once told me. The only thing she had of her dead mother, except her name, which was now mine. Mami paused and stole a few moments to think—I’d seen her do this when she had no clear answer for him. When she spoke, it was with a rueful look at the broken, empty cupboard.
“I thought I was helping. There wouldn’t be a market for medicines if not.”
Babba edged in closer. “There’d be a market for murder if the Temple looked the other way.”
“Oh, please. I’m your wife, not a murderer.”
Babba relented, pulling us both into his arms. “This has gone on too long, this odd duet of ours. All the times you go gather your crazy plants, and I drop hints to the Ward that it’s all about business, something commercial, a few coppers for your marketing days, that’s all.”
Mami scowled. “You think the high priest won’t be back to take more herbs? I don’t know about that. They always want something.”
Babba pulled back, his jawline set and his eyes narrowing. “It’s Nihil’s own men stomping around now, not the Ward. And let’s stay away from the Ward until the Sabbath. The girls have no reason to go there with school canceled.”
Mami sighed. “It’s Amaniel, and she’s taking this very hard.”
I nodded and made sad eyes at Babba. It was true—the girl’s brain had gone all swamp-addled in the last day. How could I have let her storm off there all alone in that state?
But Babba wasn’t open to interpreting anyone’s mood but his own. “The women of this household have had a little too much independence for their own good. I’ve been far too indulgent. I am not letting anyone out of shouting range as long as the city’s within bowshot of a Temple Guard. They’re Nihil’s very, very best, I’m told, personally picked by each Azwan. Stay. Home.”
I remembered the crude bunch that had taunted me and briefly wondered what the very worst would look like. How much training did it take to rough up a teenage girl? I was always imagining the world of adults would open up to me like a vast, many-petaled moonbloom, radiant and fragrant with its promise of forbidden splendor. What if, in only a few six-days’ time, I found myself among the adults battling simply for survival or to keep my hide intact from soldiers or a hundred other hazards? The thought of braving a world full of such violence, a world ruled by the fickle, unpredictable Temple, was beginning to unnerve me. How would I know when I was ready to take my place in that world?
“And you,” Babba had turned that hot look at me. “You won’t be going back out to those fens with your mother. You’re to find a suitable trade for a pious girl until it’s time to marry.”
He held out his hands to Mami, waiting for the baskets. She turned them over with an irritated huff. He shoved them back into a bin by the hearth with a finality that said we weren’t to fish them out for a while, maybe ever.
If my soul were glass, it would be on the floor needing to be swept up with any remaining shards. I had a whole new reason to be miserable. No more fens. A suitable trade. There were only a handful of jobs a woman was allowed to do outside the home. Nihil’s navel, I’d be looking after other people’s poopy toddlers or hawking secondhand cooking pots from a market stall.
Mami stared at her sandals, her face rumpled and her chin quivery. No more fens together, giggling and gossiping the whole way, hair tucked under reed sun hats like it was a Sabbath every day. Sun hats and work gloves, our idea of uniforms.
Seeing her cry made my own throat seize up again.
The Azwans had to get out of our lives. Their few days here had been enough. If Mami wasn’t going to seethe, I could muster enough disgust for the whole family, and then some. I’d been a failure long enough. If I could get them to go, my constant humiliation wouldn’t have to keep spreading to my entire family. Amaniel was right. Babba was right. Even Valeo was right. My ignorance and indifference was the pox that infected them all.
Babba noticed Mami’s unhappiness and wrapped her in a tight embrace, rocking her, his lips to her forehead. I could see him mouth “love you,” and I turned away, embarrassed my parents were getting all tree-sappy sweet on each other, but also relieved. They would make it work. They always did. He did love her, even if it took a day of horrors to pry the words out of him.
The past is not a woolass. It cannot be yoked
And made to pull the plow of our days backward
Nor return our hard harvest of tears to the soil.
We cannot thrash the past into bearing the weight
Of bundled memories to some distant market.
Our pasts are the churning tide, ebbing before us.
We steer ourselves onto the sharp shoals of regret
Again and again, unable to free ourselves
From the unyielding grip of its undertow
Until the mercy we would claim as our future
Has drowned in our wake.
—by Markden of Ilyadell, translated from the Fernai
By the next morning, our house was as tidied as we could make it, the rugs smoothed against the tile floor, the furniture righted and pottery shards buried out back. Just in time, as the neighbors were dropping by our hearth again. Mami had no tea to make or glasses to serve it in, so they sat with their hands folded and lips sealed and watched the swollen canals carry away odd bits of clothing, wooden bowls, and other flotsam from people’s lives.
“Nihil sows doubt among us,” someone would say.
“His way is uncertain, his path marked by discord,” another would add. That would bring a “so be it” or two before everyone lapsed into silence again, not wanting to talk but not wanting to go home. An uncle from several streets over insisted I should praise Nihil to have escaped my brush with the soldiers without harm. He’d heard other girls hadn’t been so lucky. They’d have to cut their hair as a mark of their shame. Only the chaste—virgin girls and married women—could keep their hair long, if modestly hidden.
Mami overheard us talking and waggled a finger. “Why is it always the woman’s fault? The soldiers have prostitutes in town they could’ve used. It’s their shame for what they’ve done.”
A few people shook their heads at Mami. I could hear murmurs, but only a neighbor, a healer friend of Mami’s, spoke. “When we’ve mastered our doubts, Lia, our faith will be strong.”
Mami rolled her eyes at the platitude. “Small comfort.”
I sidled up next to her. “Well, why is it always our fault? Why is it that way in Scriptures, too? It’s always us tempting them.”
But it was already too late for an answer. Babba put a hand on Mami’s sleeve, and changed Mami’s whole demeanor. I could see the defiance slip away as her shoulders sagged. She was remembering Babba’s warning.
“Yes, of course,” Mami said. “When I’ve mastered my doubts, my faith will be strong.”
One of my old aunties beamed up at her. “Ah, Lia dear, and Hadara, you know we all love you, but the Azwans won’t care what you mean to us. We’re just looking out for you.”
Mami sighed. “I know, I know. And the girls, too. They should learn from a better example than their nearly heretical mother.”
The auntie chuckled. “And that’s why you send them to school. Though Hadara, you’re out in the wilds at least once a six-day, no? That’ll have to stop.”
I didn’t need the reminder that my beautiful fens were a world away until the Azswans were gone.
The healer friend of Mami’s stood and stretched. “I likely have some healing to do. You should come with
me.”
“I have no more herbs. And I wouldn’t dare use them if I did.”
“Nihil’s ambiguities are the best salves. It is for us to trust the mystery of his intent, darling Lia.”
The two women strolled off arm in arm with a fluttering of skirts, and I caught a glimpse of Mami smiling as they turned the corner. I had no idea why Mami thought school would be a better example than hers, when her kindness did more for people than lashes with a stick. Why didn’t that bring honor to families, instead of how fervently one prayed?
For myself, my uncle’s warning reminded me yet again of the hated half-human soldier. My thoughts wound around like a skiff caught in a whirlpool to the moment Valeo had pulled the other guard away from me. Many other Feroxi didn’t seem to have any sense of restraint at all, if what my uncle said was true. I wanted to believe Valeo had some sense of honor the others didn’t. I wanted to believe the impossible.
Why was that so important to me, to believe in one man’s goodness? I’d grown up surrounded by good people. Sure, they gossiped all the time, and not all of it was very pleasant, and much of it was about Mami and myself. But they were good, at least by my definition. They shared hearths and cookpots and often food and passed along hand-me-downs to strangers and looked out for each other’s kids and old folks. I could count on anyone at our hearth to look after me if I were sick.
Surely, such people existed on the mainland, too, and had birthed and raised these soldiers like my aunties and uncles had raised their sons. Yet the soldiers believed they had a right to do what they had done, and that Nihil himself approved. I couldn’t reconcile cheerful Feroxi mothers sending their big boy-men off to school with the idea they’d approve of their actions here.
I sighed and stared down the walkway where the healer and Mami had gone, only to see them hustling back again, waving and shouting to everyone to come quick and pointing toward the canal. Like most of the houses in Port Sapphire, ours was a rickety triangle on stilts on a shady peninsula. These stuck out like scores of jagged fingers, each sporting several clusters of homes and hearths. Canals wove between and around us, with boardwalks built on either side, forming a crazy maze of both watery and wooden thoroughfares that threaded through the city.
We raced to where the healer pointed. A man on the opposite bank was trying to lift something out of the water with a long pole.
It was a body. A man, it looked like, naked except for a tangle of weeds and brambles. He’d been strapped to a barrel to keep him afloat, but the barrel kept rolling and bobbing, the man’s body submerging and resurfacing in the swollen canal. The rushing waters kept tugging the lip of the barrel away from the pole’s tip, and the man holding it was getting frustrated. He was leaning as far as he could without falling in. Two men on our side clambered into one of the many small boats moored to the boardwalk.
“Hurry!” people shouted.
The canal swept the body free of the pole. The rowers pulled with the tide, and a few swift oar strokes brought them downstream of the body. It didn’t take long to free it from the barrel, pull it out of the water, and turn it over as the women and girls shied away so we wouldn’t see the parts a man keeps hidden. All I could see were flashes of blue-gray skin and knots of hair and seaweed. The men rowed back, and, with the waters high enough to lap the boardwalk, the other men heaved the body out of the boat. The man was portly, and his body required the help of nearly every man there to lift so much deadweight and ease it onto the ground.
Babba let out a cry. “The Lord Portreeve.”
The words echoed across the crowd. The Lord Portreeve had drowned. Mami shook her head and sighed. Other women dabbed their eyes with the corners of their head scarves. He had a reputation for drinking; I hoped it hadn’t killed him. My stomach had rolled along with the sight of the barrel bobbing in the water, and it wasn’t settling down any. Drowned. But how did he end up on a barrel?
“Not drowned,” a male voice said. Then Babba again: “He’s been murdered.”
Cries went through the women. Mami grabbed Rishi, and I grabbed Amaniel, who clung back, as if whoever had killed his lordship might be among us. Forget modesty, though; I wanted to know what had happened. So did Amaniel, and the two of us tried to push closer. Through the mass of arms and shoulders, however, all I could see was the bloated outline of the man and that horrid, mottled skin. Someone moved aside, and I got a single glimpse of a wide gash at his throat, emptied of blood to a bluish white. His death mask bore all the signs of a violent death, his head thrown back at a garish angle, the mouth agape, tongue swollen, a face forever locked in silent screaming.
I clung to Amaniel, my breath coming in pained wheezes while I fought to control the upheaval in my stomach. I shut my eyes, breathed deeply, and slowly opened them.
The healer squeezed in next to his lordship’s body and kneeled over him. “Slit his throat.”
More murmurs and gasps around me. But curiosity is a hard taskmaster, as they say. It drives people on even when they should know better. The two of us girls peered between elbows and shoulders as the healer kept talking.
“And burned a mark on his chest. Someone meant to send us a message.”
“What mark?” several asked at once. Others elbowed us girls aside for their own peek. “Looks like an Eternal Tree,” someone said. “Not a Feroxi rose?” “No, definitely not.” The Eternal Tree, where pious souls congregated after death. So it was the Temple. The burn mark would be the same symbol as on my school uniform, Nihil’s promise to the virtuous—and his implicit threat to the wicked. I guess I hadn’t thought about who decided who went to the Eternal Tree, or who got dumped in a canal. What had the man done to deserve damnation? He was a drunk and a fool, but there were worse sins, weren’t there?
Everyone had an opinion on the man’s death. The verdict: obviously he’d angered the Temple.
“No, no, the Azwan of Ambiguity had flattered him,” Babba said.
A woman’s voice came from the rear: “You don’t think the portreeve was the one, do you? The dybbuk?”
Everyone turned to Babba. We may share hearths with other families, but it’s as if my Babba owns every place he sets foot in. I grew up believing if he didn’t have the answer to a question, then you shouldn’t have asked it. But the Temple was making me doubt even that. There were things Babba didn’t know and couldn’t understand. The fens, for example. Why let Mami and me go out there all these years just to take it away?
The commotion sent me to the edge of the crowd, and then I backed away even farther to put distance between myself and the grim spectacle. First, the heap of men at the boat launch. Now this. It was too many bodies for me in such a short time. An argument developed over whether to carry the dead man back to his family or spare him this last humiliation through the streets. Someone suggested rowing him back, and that was quickly rejected as again too public. Finally, a neighbor retrieved a rug and wrapped the man like a giant sausage roll. It’d be funny, but it wasn’t.
Babba led the men who carried off the portreeve, hoisted with grunts and groans onto half a dozen shoulders, and the rest of the crowd thinned and headed for their homes as if that offered some semblance of safety. I looked my house up and down, the creaky boards and flaked paint, the frayed thatching, the broken-down door propped clumsily up again, and knew I didn’t want to be there at the moment. Babba was wrong—our home was no safer than the streets. I could’ve died or lost my honor right there on the floor of our house. I hugged my sides and dug my nails into my arms, but it didn’t help.
No, I couldn’t face it. The canals weren’t safe. Nor were the boardwalks or my own home. It all reminded me too much of how I wasn’t up to the Temple’s standards. None of us were, but me most of all. No one else in this city should have to feel this way. No one should be tainted with the scourge of my stupidity and awkwardness around all things religious. Even Amaniel was balking at me these days. It didn’t matter if I read better than any of the girls in school, or as m
uch, or could do numbers and plot star charts or doodle plants that looked lifelike. I didn’t belong, and Babba said the city was going to blame any new misfortune or unwanted attention on people like us—like me.
Before I was really conscious of having made the decision, I had slipped onto the main boardwalk and was following it north, away from the Ward, away from home, toward a stretch of beach usually crowded with couples holding hands or children tossing pebbles into the roaring surf. The beach faced toward the open sea, and I wanted to drown my worries in its steady thunder.
As the houses thinned, I passed the low-lying croplands and became aware that I wasn’t alone. The sound of distant bootsteps reverberated forward. I glanced over my shoulder.
I don’t know why I was surprised to see Valeo stomping along after me. This put to rest the idea he’d been assigned to routine patrol by our house earlier. I slowed my pace and then stopped, wondering if I should run, and where. Ahead of me lay the beach, which I could see was deserted. Why hadn’t I listened to Babba? I didn’t even care about the trouble I’d be in. I’d rather have him hollering loud enough for half the city to hear than be in this spot at this moment with that terrible man coming up behind me.
My first instinct was to bolt through the rows of crops, but I fought that back. Something was wrong. Something that didn’t have anything to do with Valeo. The air was unnaturally still. No birds, no people, no movement. No birds. At all. Not one cry or chirp or flutter of wings.
I glanced around at row crops to either side and spotted a flash of glowing eyes, low to the ground, and far too close. A mash cat swished its tail and crept forward on its haunches. Adult, and big, and no doubt hungry. It was near sunset, its usual hunting time. As bony as I was, I was still an easier catch than a crane. After all, I couldn’t fly away. I spread both legs as wide as I could and slowly, cautiously raised both arms over my head, making my body as large as possible. I kept my eyes locked on the cat’s and waited.
The Temple of Doubt Page 7