by Wendy Orr
Goats can cry, but people can’t. The only chance of the bull god being merciful is to trick him into thinking that the island is happy to send tribute. When the two dancers come out from the Hall, their faces as white as their fresh new tunics, they’re greeted by a cheer of a thousand voices.
Even Aissa opens her mouth, though no sound comes out.
The Lady kisses the dancers’ foreheads. ‘Given freely,’ she chants, and the people echo.
‘Given with joy,
to honour the gods.
Accept our offering,
given freely,
sent with joy.’
The gates swing open, and the two dancers fall in behind the captain to lead the long procession of bearers and tribute down the road. People throng around them, touching their arms, tossing flowers and gifts of dried figs or honey cakes for the voyage. The black cat weaves between their legs, his tail high.
The ship’s warriors bring up the rear, their eyes darting anxiously and spears at the ready. The chief marches beside the captain, but the Lady stays at the sanctuary, because she’s wearing such tall shoes that she can’t walk.
Aissa follows the crowd. They’re mostly so busy trying to trick the gods that they forget to spit at her. But she knows how fast the mood can change; she stops at the first bend, where she can look down at the cove.
‘So lucky to serve the gods!’ she hears, as she watches the sailors haul the tribute up onto their black-decked ship. The goat kids’ bleating carries over the noise of the crowd.
The two youths are hoisted aboard. Aissa can see the fear on their faces from here.
‘What joy, to go across the sea!’
Aissa doesn’t have to worry about lying to the gods. If they can hear her thoughts, they know that she’d trade places with the dancers in the blink of an eye.
3
THE FIREFLIES OF REBIRTH
Pretending to be happy only lasts while the ship is in sight. When not even the sharpest eye can see a smudge on the waves, the weeping begins.
The last quarter of the late spring moon has always been the time of mourning – the farewell for all the souls who have died during the year. Now, if two families are crying for the new bull dancers, who are still alive, not even the gods need to know.
Grieving is the only way to make sure that the dead don’t come back to haunt the living. They need a lot of tears, a lot of wailing, and the people they’ve left behind need it too. Families tear their hair and rip their clothes because that’s better than feeling as if their souls have been ripped from their bodies. The potter takes her pots, one by one, and smashes them in front of the sanctuary. Sharp shards litter the square and bare feet bleed, but the potter still can’t stop crying.
Aissa thinks of the dead she knows: the bull dancers, the old gardener who just didn’t wake up one morning, the tanner’s little girl who fell into the pits with the hides, the guard who broke his leg on a mountain trail and died painfully as it rotted. I could cry for the tanner’s daughter, Aissa thinks. She was too young to know that I was cursed.
It doesn’t work: her tears are as blocked as her throat.
But now seven days and seven nights have passed, and the moon is full. Tonight is Firefly Night, when the dead souls fly free, ready to be reborn. Today is a time of cleansing and new clothes, to make everything fresh for the rebirth. Servants are given their freshly washed, handed-down tunics for the next year. Aissa’s is neatly folded in a corner of the kitchen; she’s not going to put it on till she’s finished her chores, but her mind keeps going back to it: clean and almost white, with all the tears mended.
The sun is sinking low into the western sea. The square is starting to hum with excitement: farmers and fishers are arriving, hunters are swaggering in their finest skins and townfolk are parading their finery.
Aissa is scrubbing the servants’ privy.
She’d filled two buckets at the well before this morning’s dawn ceremony, and she hasn’t stopped sweeping, scrubbing and hauling soil and water ever since. Even this privy, which is really just a shelter around a hole behind the vegetable garden, needs to be spotless by sunset.
It stinks. All the privies stink.
So does Aissa – which is why she’ll never see the celebration.
There’s a roar from the square. The Lady and her family have appeared.
The first year
Aissa still new
cursed but clean,
Kelya holding tight
when the chief called the names
for Dada, Gaggie and Poppa.
Kelya howling
waggling her tongue,
‘Like this! Like this.’
Aissa’s tongue waggling
– like this, like this –
with no howl coming;
her throat staying quiet
still as stone.
And the same today,
eight years older
still as silent:
her tongue can wag
but her throat won’t wail.
‘Honour your dead!’
calls the Lady to the crowd
and they lululu back,
fishers and farmers,
hunters and town,
a thousand tongues trilling,
a thousand throats howling
the lululu of grief
that Aissa keeps in her heart.
Then the Lady and the chief,
Fila and three small brothers
start out the gate
and the crowd parts
like a river for a rock
to stream up the mountain.
‘Honour Melos the guard!’ calls the chief
and guards and potters,
bakers and tailors,
toddlers on shoulders,
gaggies with sticks
and lowly servants
wail for Melos.
The names will be called
all the way up the mountain
and all as one
the island will wail
for each of the dead.
Only Aissa is too impure
to follow the crowd.
Only Aissa won’t see
the fireflies of rebirth.
This time I’m not going to miss it!
It won’t take long to finish here. If she rushes into the servants’ washhouse the instant everyone else is done, she can scrub herself clean enough for that fresh new tunic—
‘Did you check the privy hole before you threw new earth in?’
Aissa jumps. Standing behind her, laughing, are the sharp-tongued kitchen twins, Half-One and Half-Two.
It’s never good when the twins are laughing.
‘Your new tunic didn’t stink the way you like it.’
‘So we threw it down the hole this morning. You can get it out now.’ Giggling gleefully, they run hand in hand to the washhouse.
The world blackens. For an instant Aissa can’t see or hear. Then the blackness turns red and rage fills her, even deeper and stronger than the despair.
Before she can think twice, she hurls her filthy rag down the hole and marches back out into the sunlight. She knows exactly what she smells like. But for once, it’s not going to stop her.
As the last of the Hall folk turn onto the road, the crowd surges behind them. They’ve come from every house in the town and every outlying farm. Old men and women walk with sticks; babies and children ride on their parents’ backs. The servants, once they’re finally clean, will trail at the end of the long, long line.
Aissa quickly breaks a few twigs off the birch tree beside the privy, and twists them into a new brush. She refills her empty buckets at the well.
Half-One and Half-Two are still waiting outside the servants’ washhouse.
They turn when they see her, and like girls in a mirror, each spit over their shoulder.
‘You better not come in here till we’re finished!’ Half-One shouts. ‘We don’t want to be polluted!’
‘You better not follow the procession: your stink will kill the fireflies!’
The curse hits Aissa like a slap. The fireflies are the souls of the dead – kill them, and there’ll be no rebirth.
But what if Half-Two’s right?
It’s too late to stop. Her plan is clear now, and she has to follow it.
Something Aissa’s never felt before surges through her, up from the soles of her feet and out through the top of her head. Excitement. It’s hard to make herself hide it and slump dejectedly, as if their words have wounded her.
‘Scrub well!’ Half-Two mocks.
I will, says the voice in Aissa’s head, and she steps into the Hall folk’s washhouse.
She blocks the door shut with her buckets.
There are benches on the two side walls and a door at each end, with a long stone tub in the middle of the room. Hot water runs through it, straight from the bubbling hot springs, and drains away at the other end. Aissa has been in this washhouse every day since she was old enough to scrub. She’d been in it only this morning. But this time is different.
Fear floods over her. What she’s planning is even more blasphemous than a joke about dead fireflies.
Not that anyone has ever said, ‘You mustn’t use any washhouse or privy except the one for your class.’
No one’s ever ordered, ‘Keep out of here except when you’re cleaning.’
They don’t need to. It’s too powerful a law to need saying.
She can’t break it. She can’t believe that she’d thought of it, even for a moment. No-Name is the lowest of the low, the filthiest of the filth – how could she even think of polluting the Hall folk’s washing place?
And what if a woman from the Hall is slow, is late, is coming in even now? She doesn’t dare imagine what will happen if she’s caught. She has to get out before it’s too late.
Aissa grabs her buckets. She shoves her shoulder against the door.
Her stink hits her. The twins’ voices ring again in her head.
She turns around and rushes back through the long washroom to the door at the other end. She’s never seen through it to the room beyond, but she knows for sure that the only people who use it have already gone. The Lady and her family are at the very head of the procession.
The Lady’s bathroom is a smaller version of the outer one, though the bath is just as long, and the fountain that pours into it is richer, taller and bubblier. On one side of the bath there’s a table with oils, combs and a bronze mirror, and on the other a carved wooden bench. Something is lying under the bench. Automatically, Aissa crosses to pick it up.
It’s a cream-coloured tunic, shredded under the left arm along an already mended seam. She pictures Fila pulling it off, rumpling it into a ball and tossing it away in disgust. It needs to be taken to the washer girls, who’ll clean it and take it to the tailors for mending, and then it’ll be given to a servant the right size. One year, when it can’t be mended any more, it may even go to Aissa. If she can keep it away from the twins.
She lays the tunic out on the edge of the fountain and lets it catch the steam.
For a long moment, she feels herself teetering on the edge of the chasm that’s opened in her world. It’s not too late to change her mind; she could still make some sort of excuse if she were caught.
She takes a deep breath. Then she slips out of her filthy rags and into the tub.
Aissa has felt warm water on the back of her hands when she’s scrubbed the Hall folk’s bath, but she’s never so much as cupped her palms into it to splash her grimy face. Never dipped her tough, blackened toes below its surface.
Servants wash in cold water, squatting in a bowl with someone else pouring the water over their hair. The Hall folk must do it in the same way, except with more comfort and warmth, because there are four seats in their stone tub.
But this bath is long and smooth, with no seats, and as Aissa steps into it she slips and falls.
Sliding into the water, the Lady’s pool,
slippery rock splashing her down
hot water bubbling
over her face,
over her mouth,
her eyes, her nose,
No-Name drowning in the Lady’s tub.
Bursting through bubbles
water streaming from hair
stinging her eyes
choking her throat.
Struggling up, grabbing the sides
because No-Name doesn’t belong
and the pool doesn’t want
the bad-luck girl;
will spit her out
like the filth she is.
She needs
to save herself fast.
Slipping again
but now the water holds
and floats her;
its warmth soothing the girl
in the Lady’s pool,
rocking to almost-sleep,
her weight lifted from her,
nothing to do but rest,
safe as if
in a mother’s arms.
Then it rocks her awake again,
and she opens eyes
to water draining brown,
draining dirt from skin and hair.
Finding the pumice stone
placed in its nook
for maids to rub
the Lady’s feet.
‘Scrub well!’ taunts Half-Two in her head.
Scrubbing hands, scrubbing feet,
scouring arms and neck
till the draining water is almost clear
and the tub releases her
to scramble out,
wet and dripping.
Grabbing her raggy tunic from the floor
and her twig brush
she scrubs
the tub’s rock walls
till no trace of No-Name
and her filth remains.
Hair dripping tangles down her neck;
not thinking now,
obeying her eyes
that see the comb on the table,
tugging it through knots,
yanking combfuls of curls –
and tears, in torrents.
Girls learn to plait hair
at their mother’s knee,
but it’s too long since this girl
had a mother to lean on.
She twists long tangles
into rough ropes –
then turns for the tunic.
Not the bad-luck girl’s own rags
filthy and crumpled,
but Fila’s discard,
steamed clean.
Fila two years younger
but taller, rounder –
the tunic is roomy,
the belt goes around twice.
Her own sandals
more dirt than leather,
but even the Lady’s feet
will carry dust home tonight.
No-Name’s hair from the Lady’s comb
thrown in the bucket
with tunic-rag and brush;
comb on the table
just as it was;
a last look around
and time to go.
But her hand hovers
over the mirror –
the magic bronze
that shows the Lady her face.
She turns it over,
looks in and sees
a girl with staring eyes,
tangled ropes of hair,
thin dark face,
twist to the mouth.
But a girl like others.
Around her neck her mama stone,
its deep-carved sign
washed clean and clear:
the dragonfly of her name.
From her mouth comes a sound
she’s never heard –
a croak of no toad,
a bark of no dog –
Mama said, ‘Quiet, still as stone,’
but she’s never had to stop
happy noise before.
Th
e name last heard on Mama’s lips
forgotten through the long, bleak years
of bad-luck child,
the twice-abandoned,
No-Name girl.
Remembered now with a rush of heat:
her name,
herself.
‘Aissa,’ she hears in her head.
‘Aissa.’
The square is empty when Aissa slips out of the Hall, though there are sounds of voices from the servants’ washhouse. Half-One and Half-Two must be in there. Any minute now they’ll be rushing out, through the front gate and up the wide road to join the servants ahead of them. That’s the way the procession has gone from the beginning of time.
But ever since the Bull King’s man didn’t spit at her, Aissa’s known that things don’t have to go the same way forever. Dumping her buckets behind the privy, she races through the kitchen gardens and out the small north gate.
There are a few houses along the narrow lane from the gate to the goat meadow. Aissa runs down it as quickly and silently as she can; there’s always a chance that someone too frail to walk is watching at a window. She mustn’t be seen.
Her heart’s thumping by the time she ducks behind the mulberry tree at the edge of the field. On the other side, she can see the long line of people winding their way slowly up the mountain track.
Aissa turns away, towards the singing path.
It’s not really called the singing path. It’s not wide enough to have a name, except maybe the little-path-around-the-high-side-of-the-goat-meadow. But for Aissa it’s the path Kelya used to take her on when she was searching for the wise-women’s herbs. And everywhere she walked, Kelya sang. She sang the herbs, she sang the flowers, she sang the lizards and the eagles. She sang for the child that had no voice.
The child never answered, but she can still hear the notes in her mind.
These days Kelya’s too blind to walk through the mountains, and the younger wise-women don’t want the privy-cleaner touching their herbs. They go themselves, or send Half-One and Half-Two for the easy ones that anyone could spot: thyme growing through the rocks, or the new asparagus poking skinny spears towards the sun.
No one knows that the twins are so terrified of the mountain snakes that they send Aissa instead.
Aissa knows what snakes can do, and wolves and wild boars as well, but she’d rather spend the day with them than Half-One and Half-Two. Her sharp eyes find the herbs quickly. Then she steals time, like a honey cake from the kitchen. Except that an hour of wandering free in the hills, running fleet as a deer, far from spit and curses, is better than any honey cake. She takes as long as she can before hiding the basket of herbs in the crook of the mulberry tree for the twins to claim.