Green g-1

by Jay Lake

  Privy to the curses and taunts flying both ways, I parted company with my friend the purser and walked up the few steps from the beach, as if I were going to market for Srini’s fruit.

  The town was even less than I recalled, a bedraggled collection of buildings on one side of the muddy track, huts and stalls on the other. I marched into the struggling market as if I knew my way, ignoring the little clicking calls from the stallholders. I understood. I looked the part here, with my skin and patchy hair, but my clothes marked me out as not local.

  I will fit in at home, I promised myself. Papa and Endurance will take me in, and it will not matter how I look.

  That was a lie, of course, and I knew it even then. But I had to see the truth for myself before I could understand the difference.

  Passing through the rotten little bazaar, I remembered this walk. I could find the farm. The Dancing Mistress had trained me very well in retracing my steps. That the gap between memory and re-creation was a decade long should not stop me.

  Passing beyond the last few buildings and a rank pen of bleating goats, I quickly climbed the road that sloped up north and west out of the miserable little town toward the dry upland I remembered from years before. A league or two, and I would be home. In my father’s arms again, where I belonged. A few more furlongs, and I could claim my life back for good and all.

  The ridgetop was as desolate as memory had made it out to be. I watched for the wayhouse where Federo and I had stopped to eat more than nine years before, but never saw it.

  Perhaps it had been a building at the edge of the town, and I had misremembered the distance.

  Wooden fences straggled back and forth across the landscape. The plants were a combination of low, scrubby bushes and spiked explosions like balls of thorns. Though I could name a hundred flowering plants and herbs of the Stone Coast, I had no words in Petraean or Seliu for what grew here so close to my home. A few herds of goats as worn and threadbare as their fields eyed me suspiciously when I passed. Otherwise, I could have been on the moon for all that I saw signs of people.

  Ahead, a mountain range rose in the morning sun. It was dusty dark, a mix of rose and brown and purple shadow with the light still low in the east. The line must trend north of west, I realized, to keep the shadow so.

  After all my years behind walls, I was pleased enough that I could see landforms and understand what they would have been on a map.

  The road stayed almost level, still rising a bit as I headed away from Little Bhopura. Nothing changed in an hour of walking except that the fences came closer together and the goats were slightly more numerous.

  It all became different within another dozen strides. The road crested and dropped between embankments. An entirely different landscape spread before me, a plain much lower than the ridge I’d been crossing, that stretched from here to the distant mountains. A wide river glinting silver cut lazy curves through an endless patchwork of squares and lines.

  Rice paddies. Ditches. Villages. Down there, somewhere close to me, was my home. My foot slipped on some gravel, and to my surprise, I fell seated to the ground. The shock ran through my buttocks and hips, small stones cutting in even past the canvas trousers. The greater shock was how my eyes filled with tears. I felt as if my body had begun to spew hot pepper.

  I sat in the road and sobbed aloud as I had not done since the first days of my captivity. Home stretched before me like the Fields of Promise before Barzak the Deliverer in the last canto of The Book of Lesser Fates. I was young, alive, and won free from slavery.

  Still, I cried. My chest shuddered. My nose filled with heavy mucus until it threatened to drain and choke me. A grief I could not name clutched at my heart. Darkness covered my eyes.

  I tried to fight free. I had not cried like this, ever. What am I mourning so deeply? Grandmother? My mother, whom I could not remember at all? Mistress Tirelle?

  Finally it came to me that I was crying for the girl I could have been. The woman I would never be. My path was bent, perhaps beyond repair. Regardless, I must locate Papa and Endurance and see what could be made right. I was aware my father would not know me, though I’d avoided considering that until now.

  I only hoped I could know him.

  It took some while for me to reach calm. Finally I stood, dusted off my trousers, and headed down the hill. The river looped not far from the base of the escarpment-I was not yet any decent judge of distance then, but even to my untrained eye it was close-and a crossroads there, which would take me somewhere near home.

  If I could not find it, I would ask. If I could not ask, I would walk, quartering these fields until Papa’s hut was before me.

  Of course, I could not just make my way back. Federo had not been able to give me specific directions. I did not know my father’s name. He was just “Papa” to me. So I walked toward the little cluster of huts where the roads met.

  The river was a flat, dark presence by the time I got there. The sun’s climb toward the zenith had stolen his silver, and paid the land back with heat. My canvas shirt would soon be a punishment, but I had nothing else to wear except the belled silk, and that would not be enough for simple modesty.

  A thin-muzzled white dog, a mangy bitch red and gray with dust, slunk out from the first mud-brick hut to investigate me. She growled once, but I stared close into her eyes and spoke some of the simple words Mistress Balnea had taught me, from the language all dogs know in their blood and bone. With a whimper, the bitch sat and began to scratch at fleas, though her eyes tracked me as close as any prey.

  Children played in the middle of the pathetic town. They were bandy-legged, with potbellies and slack jaws. Their skins were much darker than mine from the burning of the sun. I could see the dents of ribs upon their thin chests.

  Had I been like this? What had Federo seen in me?

  I wanted to ask after Papa’s fields, but there was no way to make a question. A woman with her belled silk wrapped around her stepped to the empty doorway of another hut to stare at me. She had a wide jaw, and was not so dark as the children, but matched them for her gauntness.

  They have little here, except recent famine, I thought. The fields beyond the village were flooded, small green shoots poking above the water. The previous harvest must have failed. It could happen with too little water or too much. Rice cultivation was one of the few topics I had found in Mistress Danae’s books that had any bearing on my lost home.

  Lost no more, I reminded myself.

  I kept walking, giving her a single nod. She did not return it, but stared me out of her little village and onto the road beyond. I headed right, back toward the north, on an instinct that counted as little more than a whim. The dust clouded with each fall of my sailor’s boots. The sun pressed down upon my head as I had remembered it doing all those years ago. Except then, it had been my friend, my constant companion, while now I could feel by the warming of the right side of my face that it had become my enemy.

  Had I really set out carrying no water? What a fool I was.

  I walked, looking for side paths. Brick piles were scattered here and there along the way toward the river. When a man stepped out of one, stretching to his feet, I realized these were huts. Had Papa’s been so low?

  We’d had a gatepost, and plantain trees nearby with a rich stand of bougainvilleas. These were just wretched hovels amid open fields of rice. I looked ahead at a tree line. My heart raced.

  There?

  Keeping myself from running, I followed the road. It seemed right. I was getting close.

  After passing the shadow of some struggling palms, I looked toward the next array of paddies. They were little different from the last. My heart was a stone.

  Eventually I sought out directions. A man with a hoe, wearing only a grubby dhoti, worked in the ditch by the road near the shadow of a familiar baobab tree. I knew I was close.

  “Please, sir,” I said.

  He stopped swinging his tool-a spiked club, really-and stared at me without a
nswering.

  “I am looking for a farm. A man of middle years, with a white ox named Endurance.”

  The farmer shrugged and went back to cutting mud. I knew he would use it to shore one of the paddy ditches. I kept walking, asked my question twice more before a man with a cart filled with short straw pointed onward. “Endurance, hmm?” he said. “Fifth walkway on the right. You are wanting Pinarjee’s place, perhaps.”

  Pinarjee! A name. I nearly cried, instead pressing my hands together, and I bowed. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Get on, boy, to whatever work it is you are missing.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Counting carefully, I found the fifth walkway. I trembled as I stepped onto it. A stand of plantains rose ahead of me close by a pair of tumbledown huts. A ragged row of stumps showed where my bougainvilleas might once have grown. Cut for firewood?

  I walked slowly, my pace dragging more with every step. A crude fence enclosed the huts. I’d remembered the gatepost being almost as tall as Federo, but this was a little gnarled thing that looked as if it had been assembled by a dull-witted child.

  Then I heard the clop of a wooden bell. Endurance appeared from behind the huts, rising to his feet from where he had been sitting. He stared at me. My pace quickened; my eyes filled once more. The ox snuffled once, twice, then shook his head. The bell echoed again and again.

  Did he know me, even now, after these years? Memory was a pain sharp as any knife.

  A woman stepped out of the hut and stared as well. She was thin, dark, and wore only a length of grubby linen wrapped twice around her and then over her shoulder.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  I stopped. Endurance whuffled. Taking a deep breath to fight off the quaver in my voice, I said, “I am my father’s daughter, finally come home again.”

  She approached and took my chin in her hand to turn my face. “Pinar’s daughter died with her mother, as a small child. But yes

  … you have his look.”

  That was the moment when I should have turned and retraced my steps. That was the moment when I should have left the memory of my home as it was. That was the moment when my papa’s love was still whole.

  Like a fool, twice a fool, I stood my ground. “Endurance knows me. The ox remembers.”

  She glanced over her shoulder. “That old bag of bones? He goes to slaughter next week.” Then she shouted, “ Pinar! Come out here now.”

  My father emerged from his hut, shaking, tired, to stare blank-eyed at me as if he’d never seen me before in my life. I saw his face, wanted to run to hug him, but his wife’s hand was tight upon my arm as my heart collapsed. Endurance continued to shake his head, ears flapping and his breath huffing as his bell tolled.

  The ox had not meant to welcome me home. He had meant to warn me away.

  That afternoon, I stood calf-deep in a paddy pulling weeds. The ox was sleeping once more behind the hut that had been his stall in earlier years. Papa-Pinarjee-slept as well. Only his wife was out with me. Shar, her name was.

  “If this is your house, then you’ll work for your keep like everyone else,” she said fiercely.

  “Why does he not know me?”

  Shar chopped with her hoe, breaking clods and tearing up some of the small waxy plants we were removing. I waited for her to answer, but she kept working. So I worked, too.

  Finally she said, “He does not recognize much anymore. Sometimes he cries out for Mira.” She looked at me sidelong. “His mother, that was.”

  “I remember Grandmother,” I said softly.

  “You remember nothing!” Her voice was a shriek as she dropped her hoe. “Listen to you. You don’t talk like a woman. Your voice is foreign. Your clothes are foreign. You don’t even walk like a woman!” Shar leaned close, her voice dropping to an angry hiss. “This is not your home. It is mine. Pinar…” She swallowed a sob, then continued. “Pinar, whatever is left of him, is my husband.”

  I don’t know what I’d hoped for in coming here. Certainly not a frightened, angry woman living with a man whose spirit had already departed from behind his eyes. The ditches where I’d swum and played were filled with dark water and stinking moss. Insects the size of my hand flitted among the plantains of my memory.

  Even Endurance was old.

  My heart crumbled. Before Shar, I swallowed my tears, but she must have read it on my face.

  “Go back to your city, little foreign girl. Leave us to starve in our own way. This land is not yours.” She spat in the water at my feet. “It never was.”

  I found a shard of courage. “Wh-what do you fear?”

  She looked at me as if I were stupid.

  “I d-do not know,” I said. “I do not know why you are so angry.”

  “Because, you fool, you came back. If the village elders believe you are his child, when he dies, all this land will be yours. They will marry you to a likely boy, and I will have nothing.”

  All what land, I thought. A pair of rice paddies and a half-rotten stand of plantains? Seen through the eyes of the Stone Coast, it was on the tip of my tongue to ask who would want this. But the answer was clear enough: Shar. The woman who fed and cleaned my father enough that he remained alive even in the grip of whatever madness had claimed him.

  Love? Or just inheritance?

  Wars had been fought over less, in the history of the Stone Coast.

  I understood my mistake then. Everything I cherished in memory had been a lie. If I’d stayed here, I’d have been as fat-bellied and skinny-legged as those children I’d passed. Or already married off, to get my hungry mouth out of the house. I’d spent years behind bluestone walls longing for what had been taken from me.

  My captors had been right. Rather, I should have been on my knees thanking the Factor for what he had taken me from.

  I reached out to touch her arm, soft as I knew to do it. “I do not want your land, Shar. I thought this was my h-home, but I was very far wrong. Th-thank you for caring for my papa.”

  Her eyes filled with tears then. “Go, then. Keep him in your mind however you remember him. Don’t see him the way he is now.”

  Shouldering my hoe, which must have been Papa’s when he and Shar had worked the fields together, I walked back to the hut. I knocked muck from the blade, then wiped it with my hand, before setting the tool by the door. My father stared from the shadows within. His eyes glinted as if he were an animal in a cage.

  I went to see the ox. Endurance still sat upon the ground. His back was covered with flies. I stood by his neck and hugged him. He whuffled. I could hear his gut rumbling.

  “You were my guide all those years,” I whispered in his ear.

  He was a beast, too, of course. Though somehow less an animal than Papa, now.

  I went back to the door of the hut. My sailcloth bag was there. I had no other possessions except the memories, which were sliding to dust. I squatted on my knees and looked to the darkness within. His gaze locked with mine a moment, then slipped away.

  “Papa,” I said. “Pinarjee.”

  He twitched, but did not look back at me. Flies buzzed, and the room smelled close of sweat and piss.

  “I-I love you.” I didn’t know if that was true. He had sold me, after all. How much love was that? Yet I’d been raised with clean sheets and good food and a life of the mind. What of the petty fears of Shar? I might have been a younger copy of her had I stayed here.

  Free, but tied to this land by the terror of having nothing.

  I had nothing now. Not even a name.

  “Papa. Wh-what did you and Mama call me? What was my name?”

  He sniffed once, then reached inside his dhoti to scratch at his groin.

  “What was my name?” My voice was rising despite my desire to control myself, to not frighten him. How could I come this far and not even learn this? This was the one fragment of home I could have carried away.

  “What was my name!” I screamed.

  He screamed back at me with a wordless
yawp of terror, then scuttled into the farthest corner of the hut. That gave him little more distance than he already had, but he must have felt safer there. The hot smell of fresh piss flowed around me.

  I stepped back and straightened. “I am sorry,” I muttered.

  Turning, I was startled to see Shar standing right behind me with her hoe. I slipped sideways away from the swing of her strike before I realized she was not poised to attack me.

  “I never knew.” Her voice was ragged, but I could hear the regret. “He spoke only of his mother. Baida told me he’d had a wife and daughter, before.”

  “No one ever said my name?” Tears were down my face now.

  “Oh, girl, no-”

  “Don’t call me that!” I shouted before I realized she had not intended the word as I had heard it.

  “You have demons in your head,” she snapped. Her moment of honesty was fled in the face of my anger. “Now go.”

  I stood my ground as she hefted her hoe once more. “What did he do with the money?”

  “What money?”

  “He sold me for a lifetime’s worth of wages.”

  With those words, I turned away. That was as evil a curse as I knew to lay upon her. She had given me nothing, nothing. Papa even less. I cried, walking toward the road once more. Home had been my destination all my life, and it was as lost to me as the past itself. There was nothing for me now, not here or anywhere.

  My tears led the way. I followed them into the blackness of my heart, walking onward only because there was no point in stopping.

  Alternately starving and stealing, I was over a month on the road westward. I knew nothing of how to find food in a stream or a stand of trees, unless it was ripe and hanging for the touch. On that journey, I killed my second living person. He was a bandit intent on raping me. Instead, I took him with a kick to the groin, then slew him with his own knife, before falling to my knees to vomit what little was in my stomach.