by Geoff Ryman
“To see it!” Sykantata answered. She ran to the edge of the hollow, and leapt out into the air, and there was a sudden fluttering, and she flew, as a bird.
Stefile stepped out of the shadows of the kitchen. Cara silently passed her the amethyst.
“I’ve always wanted to do that myself,” Stefile said. “Run and fly.” She watched the distant silhouette of the bird. Suddenly another bird seemed to climb out of it, and there were two of them, wheeling together on an updraft. Then Stefile asked, “Are you going to tell me, Cara?”
“Tell you what?”
“What’s going to happen.”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Explain it.” Stefile’s voice had an edge.
Cara moved like an animal in a harness it does not like. “There are threads,” she began, and lost heart for a moment, and began again. “We are made of very small threads, like weaving, one strand from the man and one from the woman, and they come together when the seeds mingle.” Her hands were pointed towards other, fingers wriggling, and she brought them together, interlocking. “That’s how we grow. Like weaving. The strands are in every part of us, half from one, half from the other.” Cara looked at her hands.
“And so?”
“And so,” Cara ducked, and smoothed down her hair, quickly, with one hand. “And so, at the end of my year, I think. I think that everything that is like a man about me goes back to what it was. The seed in my loins, and the seed out of my loins. I think that part of Syki that comes from me will go back too.”
“What does this mean.” Stefile’s mouth twitched in anger.
“I don’t know,” Cara replied, and felt Stefile’s anger gather.
The birds in the sky had divided again. There were four of them now, weaving in the wind.
Cara added: “What happens to cloth when all the warp is taken away?”
“It falls apart,” said Stefile, looking at the sky. Like a turn of a kaleidoscope, the birds divided again, and again. There was a flock of them now, calling to each other, in the sunset.
“They’re not all the same,” said Cara. There were crows and sparrows, heron and egret, hawk and pigeon. They flew screeching and cooing and hooting, in a great spiral concourse, dividing again, and again, until there was a cloud of birds, dark against the orange sky. Cara was certain of something else.
“She knows, Stef. She knows it’s going to happen.”
Stefile tossed the amethyst back at her, and stood up, hands pressed together, and went back into the house.
Stefile went to work the next day, on a doll. Silently she carved a block of wood, with deep angry strokes of the knife. She knitted a dress for it. She crushed berries to make ink, to paint eyes and a mouth on its rough head, and she took yellow thread and embroidered flowers on the dress, with quick jabs of the needle. The doll stood on the kitchen table, lopsided and lumpy, waiting for the child to return.
They found her the next morning, asleep on the kitchen floor, so small that Stefile could lift her up in one hand. They gave her warm milk to drink. “You can’t fly away from the Earth,” the child murmured. “You go very, very high, and then something stops you.” Quietly, Stefile gave her the doll. Syki took it wordlessly, cradled it to her, and fell asleep, her head on the table.
Syki said nothing about the doll, but she took it everywhere with her after that. “What’s the doll’s name?” Cara asked her once, in the kitchen.
“Hawwah,” replied the child.
“After the story in the One Book?”
“No!” said the child, as if Cara was being very stupid. “Because it’s your mother’s name.” She stirred her soup in a very adult fashion, pretending to cook. “And Stefile’s too.”
Stefile spun around from the stove. “What?”
“Your mother’s name,” said the child, her voice going thin.
“Could she know that, Cara?” Stefile demanded.
Cara raised her hands and said, “Can you, Syki?”
The child looked worried. “I only know,” she said, helpless.
“I didn’t,” said Stefile. “I didn’t know.” She lowered herself carefully onto the chair beside Syki. “What can you tell me?”
“She was called Hawwah. She didn’t have a last name. She was very small and pretty, and when she was twelve she was traded to your father, and she had three children, but she didn’t like him, so she ran away, and the dogs got her. She was fifteen then, fifteen summers. That’s all I know.”
“One year,” said Stefile. “One year younger than I am.”
There was no calendar exact enough to tell them how much time they had left. They lived as best they could. Some days they saw the child, some days not. Wading through the river, Stefile tried to snatch a fish, and there was an eruption of water where the fish had been, and the child rose out of it, shrieking with laughter. “Don’t catch me! Don’t catch me!”
“Yes I will. Yes I will,” said Stefile, laughing breathlessly. “I’m going to catch you and eat you.” The child squealed again, and ran into the reeds, and Stefile chased her into them. But she wasn’t there. Stefile knocked the reeds aside. “Syki? Stay here. Please?” There was a dart of silver, across the river. “Syki? Stay?” Stefile was alone on the mud, reflected sunlight playing on her face. Her lower jaw shook for a moment, and then was thrust forward, hard, and Stefile turned away.
In the evenings, in the kitchen, they ate without her. Stefile tried to be brisk about things. Patches of damp would suddenly open out across her clothes. “Uk. It’s my motherhood again,” she would say, and mop herself. “I feel like a spring.” But at night, she would pace the house. Cara would get up to look for her, and find her asleep on a hard kitchen chair, or in the library, amid the smell of ash, looking out of the window over the valley. “I’m all right, Cara,” she said once. “I’d rather be here. I’d rather be here when she gets back.”
Then one night, Stefile came back to the bed, and stood over it. “Cara?” she said, “Cara? There is something you should see.”
“What?”
“Syki.”
Dazed and flat-footed, Cara followed her. From down the long corridor, there came a ghostly, childish giggling. There was a light, flickering in the library.
Inside there was a small blue flame. It floated in the air, dipping and weaving and diving, and it was the fire that was laughing. It squealed when it saw Stefile, and wrapped itself, glowing, around her arm.
“I think it’s just part of her,” said Stefile, her voice dull and even. “I think it’s here to let us know she’s well.” She let the light writhe and flow about her, and brush against her ear, flickering slightly, as if nibbling it.
“It doesn’t burn. It feels like breath,” said Stefile. “It’s not like a fire at all.”
Cara could see Stefile’s face in the glow, and saw there was new quality in it. It had become heavy, as enduring and unmovable as stone. Cara feared it. Stone can break. “Come to bed,” she said. Stefile turned, and her movements had become heavy too, lumbering, like a great boulder rolling.
One day, after Syki had been gone for an absence of a week, an old woman hobbled, swaying, up the ramps of the steps to the house. She clutched the hands of two dirty, naked children. One of them carried the doll.
“Cara! Stefile!” called the old woman, in a child’s piping voice. “Come and see your great-grandchildren!”
“Who was your husband, then?” Stefile asked, arms folded.
“Oh, I didn’t need a husband,” the old woman said, proudly, straightening the silent children’s wild hair. “Or a son-in-law either.” Then she spoke to the children. “Sari, Mari, these are your great-grandparents who are many days old.”
The children sat on the steps, and Stefile tried to get them to smoke her pipe. The children looked back at her, numb and slightly uninhabited. “They’re not very good at playing,” said the old woman. “They’re shadows.”
Stefile wordlessly held out her arms to her. The old wom
an limped forward and settled on Stefile’s lap, nearly as big as she was, with a sigh. She lowered her ancient head, supported on leathery strands of muscle, on to Stefile’s shoulder. “Oh, Ama,” she said. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you.” Stefile rocked her gently back and forth. The old woman fell asleep. Cara and Stefile laid her out on one of the broad steps, and went to get pillows. When they came back, there was a baby in the folds of the long brown robe.
It was a real baby, nearly bald, with downy hair and a pudgy face, and no words. Stefile rocked her too, and fed her.
“Oh my aching bags,” said Stefile ruefully, as the infant suckled. “Why do you leave them so alone, ah?” The baby gurgled and grinned, as toothlessly as the old crone. Stefile began to hum to the child an old, gentle song that she thought she had forgotten, and as she sang the two silent children began to peel away. Each white flake was a butterfly, until there was a cloud of butterflies in the garden. Suddenly they clustered, fluttering, around Stefile, and rose up, and the child was gone again.
That night, as they lay beside each other, Stefile began to speak. “I feel like I’m on a rope bridge,” she said, “the kind that only has a single cord to walk across. And I have to keep very calm, and look only straight ahead, and not look down. I just have to keep walking, straight ahead.”
Summer ripened. It got too hot to work outside during the day. For fun, Cara tried to teach Stefile her four spells. Stefile stood over the stove, making clicking and clacking noises in her throat, and chuckling. The embers remained cold.
“There’s no need,” Cara said. “The world doesn’t want it.”
“I don’t. Not in this heat. You try.”
Cara did, making the Spell of Fire, and nothing happened. “Ah, well,” she smiled. Like a cold dew, realisation settled over her. The magic was going. She was not a great sorceress any longer. The realisation grew, in silence, filling her days, filling the house, one more unspoken thing.
In the library, Cara began to teach Stefile how to read. They were rehearsing the word signs, when the arm floated in through the window, and lay on Cara’s lap. It had gone suddenly grey, its severed edges white and crinkled and soft.
“It’s dying,” said Cara immediately, as if jumping to a conclusion, she could make it wrong. She took its hand, and felt the fingers feebly close around hers, felt them throb. The arm folded itself up, like a baby in the womb, and its brother arm cradled it. Syki came down from nowhere and knelt beside Cara, and watched, tense and wide-eyed, the process of death. The arm would twitch and shudder fitfully. It lay still for a very long time before Cara finally admitted that it was dead.
They buried it, like a favourite animal, in the garden. “Another place to plant a flower,” sighed Cara, bitterly. She could not persuade Syki to leave the grave.
“But what will happen to it?” Syki demanded, scowling.
“Nothing. It’s ceased to be. That’s all.”
“But it was part of you. Why did it die? You won’t die.”
“No,” said Cara, quietly. “But everything else will.”
“I won’t,” said Syki, firmly.
“You won’t?” said Cara, something flaring in her breast. She knelt in front of the child. “You won’t die?”
Solemnly, the child shook her head.
“Then what will happen?”
“I don’t know. But I can feel it under my skin at night. Like fingers. Like they want to get out. It makes me want to move.”
“Are you frightened?” Cara asked.
The child looked up, lips pressed together, and nodded yes. She took Cara’s hand and walked with her up to the house.
That night, Syki ate with them again. Cara let her drink some wine, and she fell asleep on Cara’s lap, her ruddy cheeks squashed flat against her, her tiny red mouth agape. Stefile knelt, and stroked the disordered hair on the head that still seemed too large for the infant body. She pressed her face against the child’s. When Cara felt Stefile’s cheeks, they were slippery with moisture. They carried the child to bed, to sleep between them.
The next morning, Cara awoke in a disordered bed, with a great sense of well-being. In a kind of daze of comfort, she watched dust swirl in rays of sunlight. Cara’s mother had always said something very strange about dust: that it was the remains of the dead, and should be respected. “The air is full of other people,” she had told Cara. The dust in the sunlight looked like stars.
In the centre of Cara’s head, as though a fist had unclenched, there was a marvellous sense of relief and release. She relished it in her warm bed.
She would have to be up soon, and make Tikki’s breakfast. She would make porridge and shake thick wads of goat butter from the knife onto the porridge to melt. Father would already be out in the fields. It was getting late. With sudden decision, she threw the quilt from her, stood up, her body slim and strong like a reed, and flapped barefoot across the matted floor. She had to hiss to suck back the spittle that tried to escape between her teeth. Her face. She ran her fingers over it, ridged and furrowed like dried leather. Somehow this morning, she felt so good she didn’t even mind about her face. She’d grown used to it, perhaps, and besides, there was sunlight and porridge to be made, and her books to read. She slipped on her racki, her morning robe. It was light and cool and white. She had forgotten how much she loved it. Who, she wondered, had repainted the fresco on her wall?
She padded down the long silent corridor. “Tikki?” she called. “Tik-ki.”
In the kitchen, sitting desolate on the floor, in a rough woollen dress, was a woman.
The world was a wall, with Cara’s shadow on it, but the shadow was cast by two different, strong lights. There were two shadows, pale and wan. They were dark and clear only where they intersected. With a kind of lurching nausea, Cara seemed to see them move together, until they made a single shape.
She remembered her father, Ata, what had happened to him.I am the earth. Abomination. Kill me, her brother had asked her. And the dream thing, was it possible, manhood. And the Galu, and the Serpent, and the Flower, and this woman.
Who was she?
Harsh-faced, thick-lipped bondgirl. The first time Cara had seen her, she had been slapping a child’s face as hard as she could. Then blowing dust and magic. She had been a man, and had left part of herself irreparably behind, to mingle more intimately with the girl than the rest of Cara could, to engender life.
“Ste-Ste-Stefile,” she stammered, remembering a name.
The woman stared back at her, steadily, hollow-eyed, head leaning back against the wall. Cara lowered herself, trembling, onto a kitchen chair, squinting with confusion. Was this a dream? Dreams were like this, everything familiar, but horrible. It was as though she had been away no time at all, only to find everything, everything changed.
“There was a child,” Cara remembered.
The woman only stared back at her, unblinking.
“Where. Where is it?”
“Gone,” the woman said. The word was a weight, and Cara felt what it meant before she understood it.
“She was torn apart,” the woman said calmly. “Like you were. Only you came back. How much have you forgotten?”
Cara stared back at her, numbly. There had been a child who could run. There had been love. “Torn apart?”
“Oh well and fine,” said the woman. “You don’t remember. I wish I didn’t either. We had a child. Or rather I did. I don’t suppose it is yours, any longer. It doesn’t matter. Babies die. Only, of course, this one didn’t quite die, did it?”
“I-I-I-I-I-I-I,” stammered Cara, stuck on the word, or rather, the idea. “I-I-I-I-I-I-I.”
“Bite on it,” said the woman, wearily.
Cara did. They sat in silence. Then something stirred in the woman’s face, and she spoke again, sour lines down either side of her mouth.
“She spun round and round. Like a spindle. The quilt got tangled up around her feet. It was like you said. The threads were being pulled out of her. T
hey went back into you. She spread out.” The woman’s hands made a smooth, spreading motion. “All red.”
“I-I-I-I-I-I,” Cara began again.
“I can’t stand that,” the woman said. It was simple fact.
“I-I’m sorry,” Cara was suddenly able to say. “Oh, Stef, I’m sorry.”
The woman’s mouth twitched. She pulled in air, and expelled it again. “Yah,” she said, looking down at her hands. “Yah. I think so.” The hands made a small, helpless gesture. “You told me it was coming.” Then she looked up, and looked at Cara with the same unblinking stare.
“Hello, Cal Cara Kerig,” she said. She flicked a finger towards Cara’s face. “Did the change do that?”
Cara sucked in spittle with a startled hiss. She realised she had never told Stefile about her face. Why? Why hadn’t the Flower healed it?
“No. The Galu did that when they came.”
“You look about the same. Around the eyes. The rest is ruin.”
“I know,” said Cara, looking away.
“I’m sorry,” said Stefile. “Not that saying sorry helps.”
“I know.”
“How much do you remember?”
“It—it’s all coming back.”
“That’s a shame,” said Stefile. “I don’t suppose you can go back?”
Cara shook her head. There was a decorative groove along the back of the chair, and she was running a fingernail back and forth along it. “No.”
“No. You told me that too. You told me everything. And me not quite believing all the while. Oh. It’s been a strange year, you’ve led me, Cal Cara Kerig. Quite gaudy in its way. Not as gaudy as yours.”
“Gaudy?” Cara thought of the afflictions of her family, and the Land of the Dead, where there was no colour.
“Sorry,” said Stefile, her voice still dull. “It’s a peasant word. It means I was happy.”
“So was I.” Cara glanced at Stefile, surreptitiously. When the magic had gone, it had taken lust with it too. But Cara remembered love.
“Oh no,” said Stefile, in a small, weary voice. Milk came spreading from out of her breasts out across her rough wool dress. She sat on the floor, unmoving. “Damn. Damn everything,” she cursed. As if exhausted, she fought her way to her feet, pushing herself up from her knees. “Damn the world.”