Too much blood. Those empty staring heads. What were they thinking? This was not I. I did not do this thing.
As though in response, TeSin bent forward, vomiting. I lifted out of him, expelled from his mind.
The soothsayer, lying on a pallet by the medical tent, opened his eyes and pointed at me with a clawed finger. “Stop!” he hissed.
Get me away from here, I thought fiercely. Help me wake.
And suddenly I was lying on the floor of my chamber, with an aching head and the taste of vomit in my mouth. I struggled to my feet, and was sick in the chamber pot.
Chapter Twelve
N’tombe
The room seemed to sway. Outside, the bell rang for lauds. I thought of the curved sword, swinging bright in the afternoon sun, and felt sick again. My head hurt.
“There, there, Lady,” Nurse crooned, stroking my cheek with work-roughened fingers.
A chambermaid poked her head into the room. “You rang, My Lady?”
“I did,” Nurse got to her feet. “Help me with her, girl. The poor lamb had too busy a day yesterday.”
The chambermaid stayed by the door, screwing her apron in her hands. “Sorry, Missus. Ma says to never go near a sick person.”
“Can I be of assistance?”
The chambermaid was suddenly silent. Nurse too. It took a lot to silence Nurse. I lifted my head.
A black-skinned woman stood in the doorway, her gray eyes concerned. N’tombe. The chambermaid made the sign of the cross and backed out the door. “I’ll fetch some water,” she said quickly.
“’Tis a fever,” muttered Nurse. “Must have drunk some evil water, out there in that nasty forest. Why you needed to go into that horrible, god-forsaken place, Lady, I will never know. There, there, my lambkin. Let me help you into bed.”
I lay there watching Nurse bustling and muttering. “Lazy filthy sluts’ – that was the chambermaid. Finally she left me lying in state with my face washed and a thermometer thrust under my tongue. “And don’t you move it,” she threatened. “Or talk.”
N’tombe sat on the settle and watched Nurse’s activities with interest.
“She is a very busy lady,” she observed.
Defiantly, I removed the glass tube. “I’m sorry,” I said miserably. What a start for a tutor.
Inserting the thermometer back into my mouth, I thought that at least “tutor” sounded better than “governess”. More serious.
She smiled, as if she could hear me. “My name,” she pointed at her chest, “is N’tombe.”
I nodded. “I’m Dana,” I said with difficulty around the thermometer. “I’m sorry about this.”
“You have been dreaming. Very intensely. I am not surprised you feel sick.”
Her voice was gentle and strangely accented, the consonants rounded and soft. Dimly, I noticed the chambermaid returning with some water.
Nurse checked the thermometer. “You’ll live.”
N’tombe sat like a shadow on the settle as the sun lifted out of the sea. It was reassuring to have her there; I felt protected by her presence. No dream could plague me with this woman on guard.
She said nothing until the midday bell. Then, looking at her hands, she spoke slowly. At first I wasn’t sure if she was speaking to me or just to herself. Her story seemed to blend into a waking dream.
“I will tell you the tale of how I was called here, to this strange place,” her voice was low. “I come from a land that is so far away that even the great pelicans, who soar many miles, cannot find my country. Deep in the heart of Africa, my people are surrounded by thick jungle, where the elephant and okapi live.
“Many years ago, white people came to my country, and some even started a school near my village. The white ghosts – that is what we call people with white skin – had gone by the time I began my schooling. Only their language remained, which is how I speak your tongue. I teach at the school now. And so, until I set out on my journey, I had never seen anyone with white skin.”
I had never seen dark skin before. Strangely, it didn’t seem hard to imagine a land the reverse of mine, where everyone was dark. In that land I would be the stranger.
“My country is so different from yours: it is warm, but here it is very cold. I miss the warmth,” N’tombe said. “And I miss my family.”
“Why did you come here?” I whispered.
“I was called.” She crossed one leg over another and I realized, with a stab of envy, that she wore hose. With her dark skin and knotted hair, these garments looked exotic, not shocking at all.
“At home, we make our flour from maize, not wheat. It is ground by hand. It is a very repetitive task. One morning I was pounding the maize. As usual, my mind was empty of all but the up-and-down motion of pestle on mortar.”
She moved her fist up and down the way kitchen maids grind millet. “It was Auntie Zissi who felt the call. Like smoke, it drifted through the jungle, over stumps, around the elephants that creep silent as gray dawn rising. Come, it whispered.
“These calls happen sometimes. Magic worker to magic worker, we send messages to tug at heartstrings.” She smiled, a flash of white teeth. “I will tell you a funny story. The last call I felt, before this one, was Auntie Opeyemi. Auntie Opeyemi is a powerful magic worker. And one day she slipped climbing a tree and broke her arm. “Help me!” she called. Just as you follow the smell of smoke to find the source of the fire, we traced the call through the jungle. We found the old lady in a crumpled heap in the grass. She was very glad to see us.”
N’tombe smiled. “My Auntie Zissi is tiny, no larger than a child of ten years. She scolded Auntie Opeyemi. “Silly woman, at seventy years old you should have more sense than to climb a tree.” Auntie Opeyemi is very fat and very bossy. It was funny to see them arguing with each other. I went and got some men from the village to help Auntie Opeyemi back to her house where, Auntie Zissi said, she continued to quarrel with all who came near.”
I rolled over to see N’tombe’s face, entranced with the image of the argument between the magicians.
“The call that brought me here to you was different.”
“How?”
“More ... how shall I say? Elusive. Like the scent of a flower – you smell it when the wind blows in a certain direction, so you stand in one spot, sniffing like a little dog. Sniff, sniff, sniff.” N’tombe screwed up her nose and, despite my lingering headache, I laughed at her expression. “And then, pow! You can smell it.”
“Did you follow the smell?”
“Auntie felt it first. “Listen,” she said, and I stopped pounding and felt the tug at my heart.”
“I thought you said it was a smell?”
“It is hard to describe,” she said. “It is a sense of rightness, a pull that eases when you turn the right way, a scent of smoke; all these things. Like a whisper: Come to me. But this call was so subtle, so faint – it must have come from far away. “ ‘You have to go,’ Auntie Zissi said. Auntie Zissi is very bossy, but this time I didn’t argue with her because she was right. Auntie is old and frail, and cannot walk very far. And we could tell the sender was in desperate need. “In the morning. It will be a long, long walk. I will make you some food for your journey”.”
N’tombe looked down at her clasped hands. “I set off the next day,” she said slowly, adding softly, “Auntie was right. It was very far.” Looking out the window, she sighed. “Everything is so different here.”
Seeing this stranger’s sorrow made me uncomfortable. “I think I can get up now. Can you help me?”
* * *
We ate luncheon in the schoolroom. There was an adult’s desk and chair set at the front of the room, below the large chalkboard. And there was my desk, set in the dead center of the room, so when seated there the only things to be seen were the dark green board and the enormous globe set on the governess’s desk.
My eating table was placed below the window, where the room was marginally brighter. I had cleared a patch of cobwebs from the gl
ass, so by standing on a chair, I could see the activity in the courtyard below.
N’tombe paused on the threshold of the grim room. “This is where you learn?” she asked.
I shrugged. Learning was optional. “It’s where I have my lessons.”
“My students always learn.”
Any thoughts that N’tombe might be just the same as all the other governesses vanished when she went to the window, clambered onto a chair and tried the ancient metal latch. It was rusted shut, covered with dust, cobwebs and fly carcasses.
Nurse came in with our food and squeaked, “Mistress! What are you doing?”
“I am trying,” N’tombe growled through gritted teeth, “to open the window.”
“It’s never been opened before,” I said and Nurse nodded.
N’tombe planted her feet firmly on a writing desk, grabbed the catch in a fist and pushed down hard on the metal. There was a shower of dust and cobwebs but the catch didn’t move.
She tried again, pushing harder so the veins on her forehead bulged, their patterns merging with the braiding on her scalp.
“Now, Mistress,” said Nurse in a placating way. “Just leave it, there’s a good lady. We don’t want the nasty breeze coming in here and making us all cold.”
N’tombe looked at her and Nurse trailed into silence. Then my tutor smiled, such a blank look on her face that we stepped back. She pressed her little finger down on the window catch and with a pop! the catch turned and the window flew open, the breeze whirling into the stuffy room like the clean scent of spring, shivering into the corners and flapping the pages of my books.
Nurse and I stood in the middle of the windstorm, turning to watch as anything loose in the room – paper, candles, chalk – waltzed in a circle, then, as though beckoned, flew up and out the window, spiraling up over the Castle like a flock of birds.
N’tombe shut the window. “You are right,” she said calmly. “It is a little cold.”
But now the room smelt of hope and, for a change, the air was clean of dust.
Nurse shut her mouth with a snap. “Well,” she said, visibly pulling herself together, “there’s nothing like a bit of spring-cleaning, I do say. Now sit you down at the table, Lady, Mistress, and have your luncheon.”
We ate in silence. The bread, yesterday’s baking, was stale and stuck in my teeth. As I picked it out, trying hard to be ladylike and not show my new tutor my gums, I wondered whose hands had kneaded the dough and shaped the loaf. Was it Will’s? He’d moved so fast, shielding me from the arrow, no wonder the Sergeant had wanted him for the guards.
N’tombe soaked the bread in milk before eating it. How would this stone castle seem to this stranger? What would it be like to live in Africa, where everyone had dark faces and there were elephants and something else in the jungles?
“Okapi,” she said, swallowing.
I blinked at her.
“Okapi live in the jungle. They’re very rare. Hard to see; their coats are patterned. They blend with the light and shade and they move very softly.”
“You knew what I was thinking?”
She smiled and finished her milk. “How are you feeling?”
“All right, I suppose.” I thought about it. “Yes. Better.”
“It was the dream. A very vivid sending.”
“I was in someone else’s body,” I said slowly. “A man.”
“Yes.” She pushed her dishes away. “His name is TeSin. I have encountered ...” she paused, her eyes suddenly distant, “his work before. He is a general, a Noyan, in the army of the Eternal. You seem ignorant of dream states; you lurch into another’s body, and then, when you see something you are not familiar with, you lurch out again. That is why you felt so ill.”
A curved sword, raised high, the fountaining blood, the thud as the bodies of the villagers rolled, headless into the gray mud. “It was horrible.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “It was.”
“It wasn’t just a dream, was it?” It had been too vivid to be a dream of the imagination.
“No. You are right. It was not just a dream,” she said.
“Did you send it?” I scraped my chair backwards as my voice rose. “Who are you?” I said.
She smiled, a strange lopsided grin, and tucked a braid behind her ear. “Just a traveler, child.” She looked down at her hands. “I have come so far. You would not believe the distance I traveled, following that call. Over streams, mountains, around seas. Winter snow, summer heat. I had never seen snow before,” she added. “I think my feet will always feel tired. Yes, I sent you the dream. You were lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“For you, it was only a dream. For me – ah.” She paused for a moment, then in the sing-song voice of a storyteller, said:
“I followed the call east. The roads are unpaved, dusty in the heat of the dry season, mud tracks in the wet. Sometimes I traveled on boats, dugouts that tipped and swayed in the currents. I had some money for food, and when that ran out, I begged or stole. It took weeks to reach the lake. And when I did... Ah, there was so much water! I could not even see the other side.
“There were many islands, dotted across the water like stones in a pond. Holy men live on some, but others are empty, inhabited only by ghosts. The morning mist moves strangely even though there is no breeze. I rowed out to one of these islands.” She smiled at me. “Have you ever rowed a boat, Princess?”
I shook my head.
“Neither had I,” she said. “I was very clumsy. I found a boat made of reeds on the shore, and paddled it onto the lake. I was sure someone would hear me and call out “Stop!” To tell the truth, I half-hoped someone would, because when I saw the cave in the rock face ahead of me, I did not want to enter. But the call pulled me on, so I clambered out of the boat and followed a track onwards, into the dark.”
I cupped my chin on my hands. How lucky this woman was, to go wherever she wished. “Did you have a torch?”
The beads at the ends of her braids clattered as she shook her head. “I stepped very cautiously, and trailed my fingers along the walls for balance. I must have walked like this for hours. It was as though I was in a dream; a dream of darkness and water.”
“Water?”
“A river. The sound grew louder, echoing in the darkness until my head pounded with its noise. Eventually, I entered a great chamber, and I lost connection with the rock. Wind brushed my cheek. Above were constellations of blue stars, set high up into the cavern’s ceiling.”
How could there be stars inside a cave?
N’tombe smiled. “Glow-worms. They are not bright lamps, but they lit the space enough to see by, enough to see columns of stone, and the rock floor of the cave. I did not want to go further, but the call was strong and how could I go back to my aunt and tell her of my fear? So I walked into the dark, and the noise of the water grew louder.”
Sometimes I explored the cellars, carved deep into the Castle Mount, but I took care to have a torch with me. What would it be like to be alone under the earth in a strange place?
“I was not alone,” she said. “There was a boat, tied to a rough jetty. In it stood a man, holding a long pole. He beckoned, as though he was expecting me. I was very scared. But he signaled again, and what could I do?”
“You could have run away.”
She shook her head. “Running away is easy, but rarely sensible. Better to face your fear; so says Aunt Zissi, and she is very wise. So, taking a deep breath, I went forward and stepped onto the boat. It had a flat bottom. The boatman said nothing. He just undid the rope and poled us out onto the river.”
She smiled. “The ancient stories speak of a Ferryman who takes the souls of the dead to the jackal god, so for a moment I wondered if I had died and was on my way into the underworld. But I felt very cold, and I have never heard of ghosts complaining of the cold.
“As we traveled forward the cave narrowed. The light of glow-worms reflected blue on my skin, and on the hat of the Ferryman. Then we stopped
at a staging area. The man pointed to a deeper shadow in the cave wall. I didn’t know what else to do, so I got out of the boat and walked toward it. I found myself in a smaller cave, very narrow. So small I had to crawl.”
A movement caught the corner of my eye and I turned. Nurse, tray in hand, stood in the doorway, listening. The chambermaid leant against the wall behind her.
“Spiderwebs brushed against my face but I was unable to raise my hands and wipe them off. The tug of the call was strong and I had no choice, I had to follow it. I crept forward, feeling like a mindless insect burrowing in the dark.”
I shuddered.
“I pushed too hard. There was a drop into nothingness as I shot out of the crack like a cork from a bottle.” She rubbed her nose. “And as I fell forward through space, I felt as though I had been split apart and put back together again. My world turned black.”
“You fainted?”
She shrugged. “I do not know. All I know is that when I woke, there was a faint light in front of me. I was lying on a pile of rubble. With difficulty, I rose and staggered forward, toward the light, toward the lake. I must have passed below it on the ferry. Now I stood on its far shore.”
“The same lake?”
“The same, but not.”
“What do you mean?”
“I passed a transition point,” she said, “in the fall. When I opened my eyes everything was different.”
“You must have banged your head,” I said wisely. On the last week of the Festival a guardsman had been stunned in a tourney. When he came to, his eyes were glazed and he needed help to stagger off the field.
“No. It was not my head. It was the world. Everything was different.”
“What do you mean?”
“Gone were the sounds of engines. No cars, no buzzing boat motors.”
“Cars?”
“In my world, there are many machines that cough and smoke and do the work for men, if they do not break down. But now all I could hear was the sigh of the wind and the slap of the waves. And the birds, of course, they were very loud. But no people, and no machines.”
The SoulNecklace Stories Page 10