The Button Girl

by Sally Apokedak

  When Woeful began a protest Rebuke shoved his head under the water. "None of that noise, now. You're upsetting Bargess."

  Woeful climbed out of the trough, dripping and sputtering. "I've got but one change of clothes," he said, the pitch of his voice rising to a whine.

  "Thank Providence for that, then," Rebuke replied, and he shooed the little man away.

  Turning his attention to Sober and Repentance, he said, as he unlocked their ankle shackles. "Into the skim wagon, then, and not one word do I want from either of you. I've done my good deed for the day. You'll get no more from me than that."

  In the quiet, a dark dread seeped into Repentance's heart like fog slipping into a hollow.

  She gazed desperately out past the barns and prayed. Oh, please Providence. If only she didn't have to go to the ice city. If only she could work for a kind master and live in a sunshiny meadow dappled with shadows and dotted with wildflowers.

  She could learn to be content as a slave. She would learn.

  If only.

  The overlords came from their lunch, sat up on the cushioned front seat of the skim wagon, and the journey continued up the mountain. There were no horses and the driver guided the wagon using a stick that came up from the floor. Repentance and Sober bounced along on the hard bench in the open back bed of the wagon.

  As they went up the road, the slavers passed a canteen back and forth. Repentance's stomach rumbled and her mouth watered at the sweet smell that escaped the uncorked canteen. No one offered her anything to drink, though.

  No matter. She looked over the side of the wagon and feasted her eyes on the colors of field and sky.

  They skimmed up the mountain, passing several side roads. A few other skim wagons passed them going down. They also saw wagons pulled by horses and, as they got higher up the mountain, some pulled by yaks. Repentance counted fifteen farms, some with goats grazing, some with workers tending crops. In the afternoon, shaggy meadows of wildflowers and cultivated fields alike, gave way to a rolling carpet of snow, which sparkled like sugary frosting on a birthday cake. Repentance had never seen anything so clean and bright.

  "Close your worthless swamp eyes halfway," the driver said over his shoulder, "else you'll be blind inside of an hour." He and his partner pulled the brims of their hats down, but kept their pale eyes wide open.

  The overlords wrapped themselves in blankets. Repentance shivered in her thin swamp clothes. She glanced back at Sober, her teeth chattering. He sat on the floor of the wagon with his arms wrapped across his chest.

  After a time, the sun slid behind jagged mountains on the left, painting the snowy ridge on the right with a peach-colored brush as the sky faded from blue to pink to pearly gray. Repentance, in spite of being numb from cold, stared at nature's canvas in bliss. The driver stopped the skim wagon in a field beside a small, stone cabin. "Perfect timing, as always," he said, glancing at the nub of sun still visible between two peaks.

  "Chain them," the slaver said over his shoulder as he headed for the cabin, apparently unimpressed by the driver's punctuality.

  "There's no chance they'll make it down the mountain if they run," the driver said. "Not in this cold."

  The slaver turned around, his hand on the doorknob. "But they may be foolish enough to try, and frozen corpses bring no beads on the slave market, do they?"

  The steel bands of the shackle burned into Repentance's ankle when the driver clamped it on. She cried out.

  "Use the blanket," the man growled. He threw a scrawny piece of material over her. "Better drink something, too." He tossed a canteen so that it fell between Repentance and Sober.

  Sober grabbed it up and sucked down a long draft.

  Repentance waited.

  Finally he finished drinking and she held out her hand. He shook his head and tucked the canteen under his leg.

  She gaped at him. What a warthog! But he was too big to fight and it would be pointless to beg. Fine. If he wouldn't share the drink, she wouldn't share the blanket.

  As she had done the night before, Repentance again turned her back on Sober Marsh.

  She scrunched under the blanket, cocooning her body against the cold. The strange material was thin but heat radiated from it, like steam rising from the hot springs, and within a minute she was all toasty—even her shackled ankle.

  She turned over to lie on her back and saw, for the first time in her life, stars sprinkled across the darkening sky. She gasped. Let Sober keep the canteen if it made him feel better to punish her. She didn't need to drink. She was drunk on the beauty of the night sky, the nectar of Providence, Himself.

  On his side of the wagon, Sober shivered.

  He blew on his fingers.

  He rolled over.

  He scrunched up in a ball.

  His teeth chattered.

  Repentance sighed. She couldn't let him freeze. "Lie over here."

  He hesitated.

  "I'll share the blanket with you."

  He didn't move.

  "Your choice," she said. "Either share or go without. You're not getting it from me to keep for yourself."

  He stared at her, maybe trying to decide if he should take the blanket by force.

  "You can stop blaming me," she said. "You had five chances to button and you failed every one. I shouldn't have to take all the blame simply because I was the last to turn you down."

  He didn't answer. He lay on his side of the cart, his teeth chattering like woodpeckers.

  "You hate me so much? Didn't you hear the overlords? They said this cold doesn't just feel bad. It can kill you. You'd rather die than share the blanket?"

  He scooted over next to her.

  She covered him with one side of the blanket.

  After a minute his shivering stopped. A moment later the canteen landed beside her face.

  "Did it ever occur to you that I wasn't trying to get buttoned the first four years?" Sober asked. "Did you stop to think that I might have been waiting for someone?"

  She took a swig from the canteen. Milky, frosty liquid ran down her parched throat. "Oh, that's rich," she whispered.

  "That's rich? That's all you have to say?" He turned his back to her and pulled the blanket up over his shoulder.

  Repentance took another drink. What was Sober carrying on about? Her heart gave a little trip and stumbled against her ribs. He'd waited for her?

  She glanced over at his back, solid and unmoving. No. He was waiting for someone else. He only settled for Repentance when his true love turned him down. Still, the fact that he'd waited for someone was kind of romantic.

  She drank again. And again. And then she lay down to let the stars lull her to sleep and when she slept she dreamed a gray flannel scarf swirled around her like a thick fog. It wrapped around her nose and mouth, smothering her.

  The next day Repentance and Sober rode side by side, the blanket wrapped around their shoulders. The slavers gave them a little to drink. Nothing to eat.

  The scenery was not as varied as the day before. Snow. Lots of it.

  The wagon swerved and jostled Repentance against Sober. Without looking, he gave her a shove with his shoulder.

  "Sorry," Repentance said. "At least the skim wagon is not bumpy like the cart was. How do they make this thing go with no horses, though?"

  "Sunlight," Sober answered.

  "How can sunlight make a wagon move?"

  "I don't know how. All I know is that I saw four men pushing this wagon from a dark barn and the minute it got out into the sunlight, it began to hover, like a dragonfly over water. Then, last night when the sun went down, the wagon set itself down on the ground."

  "You saw it being pushed out from the barn? But you weren't looking. You were talking to Rebuke."

  "I'm not blind, Repentance, or stupid, much as that may surprise you."

  "I never said you were stupid."

  He threw her a scathing look.

  She quit arguing. He was right. She did think that all the people in her villag
e who were content to keep breeding slaves for the overlords were stupid.

  The wagon wound its way up the mountain. Several times it rounded curves and revealed something ahead, glinting in the sun. The overlord city of ice.

  The sun was still high when they drew close enough to see the city sticking out of the fold between two mountain peaks.

  "Behold your new home," the slaver said over his shoulder. "You will work there in Harthill until you drop and die."

  The city shimmered, all silver and shine. Repentance shielded her eyes, as she stared at the peaks and spires poking the sky. They drew closer and saw houses with thick walls of white, blue, and purple ice and with windows made from thin, clear slices.

  And this was the city of the overlords—they lived in such beauty but had hearts full of mud and muck. She shook her head, amazed.

  Around the city ran an ice wall some ten feet high and several feet thick. The wagon pulled to, at a wooden gate. "Slaves, failed at buttoning," the driver called up to the guard on watch.

  Once inside they followed a narrow road clotted with carts and wagons and overlords walking. The road was cut between houses of ice. On the outskirts, small, two-storied houses overlooked the lane. As they progressed the dwellings grew taller and finer, with towers and pinnacles and with intricately carved walls.

  Half an hour after entering the city, they came into a deserted square at the center of which stood a frozen fountain—a wild spray of blue and green and purple ice. Off to one side of this fanciful sculpture was a wooden frame upon which three bodies hung. The bodies were slave men. No ... they were boys. Younger than Sober. The eyes had been burned out and the fingers and toes cut off. The bodies, stiff and gray, hung naked but for thin loincloths.

  Repentance stared without understanding what she was looking at. They looked like real people, but they couldn't be. What could boys have done to make the overlords kill them in such a gruesome fashion?

  No, they couldn't be real.

  She looked from the ice fountain to the boys and back again. What was wrong with the overlords that they would want bodies, fake or not, hanging in their sparkling city?

  The driver halted the wagon right beside the wooden frame.

  A drip sounded.

  One drip.

  Repentance looked around. There was nothing wet or drippy in the frozen city.

  Another drip.

  Her gaze darted toward the sound. The next drip splashed into a reddish-brown spot, which stained the ice under the foot of the boy nearest to her.

  The horror dawned. The boys were real. And they were not long dead for the blood in one had not yet frozen.

  The little bit of drink Repentance had been thanking Providence for all morning, roiled in her stomach, threatening to come up.

  The slaver shoved the first corpse with his dragon stick. It swung over and bumped into the second, which, in turn, bumped into the last. "You see these things that used to be slaves?"

  Repentance bent her head down refusing to look.

  "Get an eyeful, girl." The slaver pointed his dragon stick at her.

  She lifted her head but lowered her eyes, trying to veil the evil sight. The ropes creaked as the boys swayed.

  "This is what becomes of any who think they can cheat us by running away," the slaver said. "We catch the runners and we hurt them and we hand them over to the swingman. After that we go down and take their family into service." He paused, maybe wanting to let his words sink in.

  Repentance couldn't really hear him. Her ears were filled with the dirge that the ropes were playing. What she wouldn't give for the sound of the swamp—the whisper of insect wings, frogs plunking into water, her mother's constant humming—she would welcome any of those noises. Anything to drown out the creaky, screaky sound of dead boys on ropes.

  Washed and dressed, polished and pressed,

  the mistress has spit on me and offered me up for sale.

  Good or bad, happy or sad,

  which master will bid on me, with bead-strings in his pail?

  ~Repentance Atwater, Slave Cart Compositions

  Chapter 6

  Horrified, sick from hunger, and achy from the long ride, Repentance dropped over the side of the wagon. Sober landed beside her, massaging the small of his back. The overlord slaver led the way across the courtyard toward a building on the north side.

  Desperate to escape the gruesome square with its dead boys, Repentance stumbled after the man, moving as fast as her trembling legs would take her.

  They entered the building through a wooden door set on metal hinges, which were frozen into an ice doorjamb. Repentance was surprised to feel a wave of heat as she passed through the door. She stopped for a moment to let her eyes make the adjustment from the blinding-white of the courtyard to the gloomy interior of the building.

  Sober plowed into her from behind, knocking her off her feet.

  Her knees and hands sank into a plush carpet from which radiated warmth.

  "Enough nonsense!" the slaver said, as he grabbed a handful of hair and yanked her up.

  She clenched her teeth to keep from screaming.

  "Two from Hot Springs for processing," their keeper told a man sitting behind a desk just inside the door.

  "Name?" The man looked up at Repentance. Then he glanced over at Sober. "A boy and a girl? What's their crime?"

  "Failed buttoning," the slaver answered.

  "How can you fail a buttoning when you have one of each available?"

  The slaver laughed. "She refused him."

  The desk clerk looked at Repentance again, his eyes large behind round glasses. "Not too bright, then, eh?" He didn't wait for her to answer. "Name?" he asked for the second time.

  "Repentance Atwater," she whispered.

  The man spun his chair around to face a bank of file cabinets. Cabinets made from some honey-colored wood Repentance didn't recognize and polished to a high gloss. Because of the heat in the room, Repentance expected to see a few drips running down the ice wall behind the cabinets, but it was smooth and dry.

  The clerk stood and pulled out the top-most cabinet drawer on the left. "Atwater, Atwater, ah, here you are. Repentance Joyous Forgiveness Abounding Atwater?"

  She nodded.

  "Hmmm, fancy name. Maybe that's why you can't think too well. Brain gets a little tired carrying around such a heavy name, no doubt." He chuckled, as he pulled several sheets of parchment from the file and shoved them across the desk. "Take them into the first room on your left. The attendant will help you."

  Repentance looked back at Sober as she pushed through the door. He was the last familiar thing in the world, and all of a sudden she was terrified to let him go. He wasn't looking at her; he was talking to the clerk. The door swished closed, blocking him from view.

  "Come along then, child," someone said.

  Repentance turned from the door to face the attendant. She was not an overlord. Her dark hair and eyes pegged her for a slave.

  "Take your clothes off," she said. "Put them in the basket there to be burned."

  Repentance took her parchment book and char-stick from her pocket and unbuttoned her britches with fat, numb fingers. Her mind felt as sluggish as her fingers. She couldn't stop thinking about the dead boys swinging outside.

  "Hurry up, child. I've not got time to dally with you."

  "I'm going as fast as I can." She yanked her blouse over her head. The thought that leaving the swamp had been a terrible mistake crawled into her heart and settled down like a holler frog digging into a mud bank for winter. Cold and heavy.

  She tossed her blouse in the basket. It landed with the heart-shaped button on top. Fishing the blouse back out, she asked in a trembling voice, "May I save my buttons?"

  The lady squinted at the blouse Repentance held. "You have a button blouse? You thought you were going to be buttoned?"

  "It's a long and tiresome tale."

  The attendant reached into her pocket and pulled out a small pair of scissor
s.

  Repentance snipped off her three gray buttons. She'd keep them to remind her of why she left. Gray buttons to remind her of her gray home and the gray tunes her mother hummed and her baby brothers' gray faces as the overlords carried them off. If she hadn't left, she'd have drowned in the gray.

  "Where are you from?" the attendant asked.

  "Hot Springs." She handed back the scissors.

  "I'm from Crooked Crick, myself," the woman said. "But it's been many years since I've been there." She directed Repentance toward a sunken pool in the middle of the room.

  Repentance crossed the floor, this one covered in thick, red carpet, and stepped into the pool. Three steps down. She sat on a shelf, steaming water lapping at her neck. "What brought you up the mountain?" she asked the attendant. The woman seemed friendly enough. Not like Rebuke and Woeful.

  The attendant laughed causing two deep dimples to form in her cheeks. "What brings anyone up the mountain? The slave wagon, of course. Ain't no other way to get up here, is there?"

  "What did you do to be taken by the slavers?"

  "No one to button. Short on boys, our village was. Tilt your head back, now. If I don't get the dirt off, you'll not fetch a high price at market. And then it's the strap for my back." The woman poured water over Repentance's head, and followed that with a healthy dollop of sweet smelling soap, which she worked through her hair. "Hey, now, what's this?" she asked scrubbing at a spot on Repentance's neck just behind her left ear.

  "Ow! Leave a little skin if you're willing."

  "You've got some smudges of dirt here that don't want to come off."

  "Not dirt. That's a birthmark and it's not coming off no matter how hard you scour. Would you please stop?"

  The woman bent to look. "Ah, a birthmark," she muttered. "An unfortunate blemish, but with a fortunate placement, anyway. No one will see it. That's alright, then." She set in again, scrubbing Repentance's scalp.