I never really found my voice, but the old women had an uncanny skill for reading my blushes and smiles and answering every question I hadn’t dared to ask.
One afternoon Nara beckoned me over to sit on her knee.
“You’re going to school tomorrow. Dahra will collect you in the morning.” she said.
I tried to smile, because they had been talking about it for days, but the thought of leaving the kitchens made my lip wobble. The woman pulled a face at me and told me to open the oven door. She pulled out a lump that looked like it had been laid in a field by a well-fed horse. I wrinkled my nose at it.
“I made this for you.” Nara told me, and slid it onto a plate. Her eyes followed it proudly as it settled into the shallow centre. She handed me a small wooden mallet, and showed me a small mark on the lump where I was to hit it. I did, rather dubiously, and the mass shattered. A glorious smell of fish came out of the middle, and the woman peeled away the shards to show me a perfectly cooked plaice, wrapped in spinach leaves and scraps of lemon. I caught up a morsel in my fingers and tasted it. It was delicious – and well worth the slap I got for eating like a peasant.
“Will you ever learn? Look. If we just put the fish in the oven on its own it would be dry and tasteless. To make it soft we wrap it in spinach leaves and clay. It looks like an ugly brown rock, but without it the whole meal would be ruined. If you’re going to call yourself Clay, you might as well know its secrets.” she shook her head at her foolishness and grinned at me. “When I went off to school my Mistress told me not to wipe my nose on my sleeve. I figured this would make a better lesson.”
I smiled shakily, and wiped my nose on my hand instead.
Dahra offered me no advice at all. She walked me to the school the next day without saying a word, but at least her eyes did not race away as quickly as before when she looked at me. My time in the kitchen had fattened me up, and my skin had grown pale and soft. Beside the willowy Siren, I looked like an uncooked apple dumpling.
How can I describe my Mistress? She was unashamedly selfish. I don’t mean that she only cared about herself. She simply did not know how to look at another person and understand how they felt. She would work single-mindedly towards whatever mattered to her, and then be offended that other people hadn’t made the same effort. She applied the same brutish logic towards caring for her ward. Until I was her equal I was simply becoming. Any effort she put into me would be wasted. I could not force myself to age or grow any faster
Happily, during my first years on the island, she had absolutely no interest in me. There were other girls whose Mistresses visited them three or four times a week. I was lucky to see Dahra once a month. When she did grace me with her presence she would pinch my face, look dissatisfied, and then ask my teachers if I could read or write. I learned quickly enough, but to Dahra I would always be an idiot.
There must have been some improvement in me, but she still couldn’t summon a scrap of praise. Why should she? I hadn’t done anything, and she could hardly congratulate me for washing my hair a few times. It was her job to take me across the apprentice complex to the school, and so she did. Dahra dumped me into a courtyard, said a few curt words to the teacher, and then disappeared without looking back.
CHAPTER 8
Most of the schoolgirls had been born on the island. Very few of them recognised their own mothers. The Siren were harshly criticised for showing favouritism to any of the girls, even the ones who they had carried in their bellies. Cossetted girls became unruly adults, after all. Some of them were Mainlanders, like myself, but they had been brought over as infants and now nobody could tell them apart.
They had no idea how to treat a new arrival, especially one with ugly cropped hair and calloused hands. Dahra’s apathy was as good as a condemnation. Within a few hours I was back where I belonged: worthless and mocked. Well, I was used to being treated like that. I did not let them see how much it hurt.
All of the children had flawless skin, arched feet and no idea how to tie their own shoes. They had started their lessons months before I had arrived. They could sound out their letters and knew the difference between a d and a b without having to bunch their hands into shapes.
What skills did I have to offer? I could climb trees and catch fish; I could scour a cooking pot and pinch someone’s earlobes so hard that they squealed. By the standards of any normal six year old my talents were exceptional. But these were not normal children.
They clustered around me as soon as I arrived. The tiles they had been drawing on clattered to their desks, and their soft shoes swished over the dusty stone. When they found out my name they shrieked and sang it back to me. Clay-ay-aya-yay!
The teacher came over to break them up. There was no sweetness in her sweating face, Dahra’s rudeness had seen to that. She looked at me as if she had scraped me off her shoe.
“How dare you make so much noise?”
When my mouth fell open at her harsh words she scowled and pulled me out of the cluster by my braid. My first morning in school was spent with my head pressed against the courtyard wall, and with my rump stinging from five lashes with a ruler. Pettiness, as I learned that day, meant more to Mistress Piper than any notion of common sense.
She was the kind of woman whose whole bearing could become utterly childish at the slightest attack. The cool, collected face she showed to the other Mistresses vanished the first time a child whispered behind her back. When she was alone with us she was spiteful. She enjoyed picking on a single child, singling them out and taunting them, until the little girl’s whole body would quiver with unshed tears. If the girl actually cried – but no, she would always bite back her sobs. The older girls told us that bad things happened to weeping brats, and we believed them.
Mistress Piper was cruel to the girls that she liked; she openly despised the ones that she did not. I was so far beneath her notice that for a few weeks she did not even bother to look at me. I learned my lessons by sneaking looks at other girls’ notebooks and tracing letters onto the table with a moist fingertip. When Mistress Piper finally noticed she made me polish every table in the schoolrooms and wash my hands with hard, stinging soap. She dropped a notebook into the bin and told me I could fetch it out at the end of the day. When I finally rescued my book the blank pages were curled up from apple cores, and the cover was stained with pickle.
When our classes were over we played outside until the old women called us into the kitchens for supper. We were only sent to our cubby rooms to sleep, and we were usually so tired from our lessons that we just fell into the sheets.
We were whisked off to the bathhouse before sunrise. We could only use it while the Siren were asleep. It would not do for them to hear us splashing around. I was so scared of making one of them angry that I held my breath whenever I passed the dividing door. Mistress Piper had scolded us so often that I was terrified of her. Surely, the real Siren would be even worse.
Mistress Dahra confirmed my suspicions. She was inexorably foul to me, and spiteful to anyone else she was forced to speak to. I could never tell whether she would be snide or serious when her sharp eyes fixed on me. The other children ran away and hid when they knew that she was coming. It was a game to them. It was life and death for me. I knew that I would not be sent away from the island, but apart from that I had no idea what the monstrous woman was allowed to do to me. Whenever I remembered the thick scars on Emma’s skin I felt faint.
Outsiders have always been intensely curious about the Siren. I am sure that my childhood memories would frustrate them. I knew less about the goddesses after a year on the island than I had when I arrived. Sometimes we glimpsed them when we lingered overlong in the bathhouse, and of course each of us had been given to a Siren for our training – but this meant nothing. The women who collected their apprentices from the classroom wore plain clothes and had no makeup on their tired faces. They spoke very little, and did not smile. They were just women. Perhaps when they were at the pier they transformed,
but we children never had the chance to see that.
Each girl loved her Mistress unconditionally. They could have been our own mothers and sisters. Some, like Dahra, were frightening – but I might say the same thing about any other mother. She was not as vindictive as Petra, and she avoided me as much as possible, so I was not afraid of her. I was jealous of the tenderness between my classmates and their Mistresses, but I did not resent them. It was unthinkable for an apprentice to speak to any Mistress but her own, but there was nothing stopping the girls from whispering their lessons into my ear.
Once we had learned how to read letters and numbers, our class was given into the care of Mistress Herry. Unlike piggy Piper, she was an actual Siren. There were days when she would arrive to our lessons with her hair in golden braids and her skin smeared in clay. When the day was over our teacher would shake out those braids into glorious waves and smooth off the clay to reveal soft, glowing skin. She would disappear from the apprentice wing with her eyes brightened with charcoal and her dress drifting around her ankles. We would watch her from our bedroom windows. When she reached the gate we would call out and beg her to come back. Mistress Herry would turn and wave at us, but we never convinced her to stay.
While she was gone we would be escorted back into Mistress Piper’s class. The fat old witch would line us up in front of the younger children, force us to answer difficult questions and then mock us when we stumbled over the answers. The little girls were supposed to laugh, I suppose, but they never did.
Mistress Herry loved riddles. She would begin each day by making us memorise one of them, and anyone who could solve it by lunchtime won a kiss and a sweet biscuit as a reward. She taught us how to tell stories, and made us act them out in front of the class. Her lessons felt so much like games that I often forgot that I was learning from her. By the end of the year, I could recite entire stories word for word, figure out devious riddles, and pretend to be a pirate (with a very convincing invisible monkey on my shoulder)! In our second year, Mistress Herry made us invent wicked secrets. We had to coax them out of each other like nuts from a shell. If you could guess a secret then you were excused from sewing practice.
I realised that the other girls trusted each other too much to guard their thoughts. They had never been challenged, or attacked, in the same way that I had. None of them could make me betray a secret, but I could read them like an open book. I won’t say that I was good at lying… but I was bad at sewing.
Since we were no longer the youngest class, we were not allowed to play. We were put to work. We began by sewing clumsy bedsheets and dresses for the other children. You could always recognise one of my smocks, because at least one of the seams would be inside out, and the stitches would prickle so much that the other girls refused to wear them. When we could brandish a needle without drawing blood we began working on finer stitches, complicated patterns, and embroidery. Well, I say ‘we’. I was usually given darning or tacking to work on in the corner.
Dahra made me spend every moment of our private lessons working in the garden. The other girls whispered that my peasant blood made me perfect for work in the fields, but they were wrong. Gardening on the island was nothing like the heavy farm work of Singen. The apprentices worked in white muslin dresses and still looked neat by supper time.
We snipped off dead flowerheads, collected seeds, and stripped new-born leaves off ancient branches. Some of the plants were kept inside heated rooms in huge clay pots. We carried water and stinking baskets of fertiliser to them every morning, which we doled out with intricately wrought silver spades.
When there weren’t enough bees we wrapped thread around our lacemaking hooks and dabbed them from flower to flower, spreading pollen until we were stricken with sneezing fits. We laid out endless trays of petals, in wax and liquor, for the older girls to refine into perfume. We squeezed sap and juice from so many stems that our hands ached. When we smeared softening cream onto our palms in the evening we could name every ingredient in the soothing ointment.
My favourite days were when we made beautiful things for the Siren. We wove flowers together into bouquets and corsages. We took things that were glorious on their own, and by the time we were finished they had become extraordinary. Sometimes the seamstresses would come out of their part of the village and sew real, live blossoms into the hems of their gowns. Jewellers would make sketches of the best roses and lilies to recreate in gold wire and precious stones. And, when all of their beauty and usefulness was over, the trees would be cut down and made into furniture that was as sweet and lovely as the living bark.
There were other tasks which we could learn – masonry, or brewing, or pulling teeth - but we weren’t interested. We were destined to become Siren. The thought of it made us giggle and shove at each other. There were twenty five of us in my class, and only eight became fully fledged Siren. We knew that most of us would fail – and yet, each girl was certain that she would succeed.
Every servant started life as an apprentice. She was demoted the very moment that she proved herself incapable of a Siren’s work. It was too cruel to think about. I was ten when my classmates started to disappear. One failed a simple examination, and another girl was scarred by acne. They spoke to their mistresses, and went to bed, and in the morning their rooms were empty.
Because so many of us were destined for that fate, we joined in the servant lessons whenever our own were cancelled. The classes turned my stomach. It was sobering to walk into a room and see beautiful women wearing homely clothes and roughening their hands with chisels, bellows and sandpaper.
I was determined not to become one of them. As the years passed I began to despise them for their faults. If they had not been so lazy in their lessons, they would not have failed. It was their own fault. They deserved my scorn.
I was not a pleasant child. I had no close friends. I started to blame the other girls for that, too.
I taught myself how to ignore loneliness. When the girls ignored me I mocked them, and I refused to be hurt by Dahra’s indifference. A Siren could work for an hour and be finished for a week, or she could work for a week and be worse off than she had been at the start. I convinced myself that I was proud of my Mistress for ignoring me, since she was working when the other Siren were being lazy. When the other girls shouted that Dahra had forgotten about me, I retorted that she trusted me to learn properly without her help.
That was a lie; the woman wouldn’t have trusted me to draw a curtain without breaking it. Her visits usually brought me to tears. She would ask me about my lessons, listen to me ramble on, and then criticise my accent, posture, hand movements, diction and even the amount of eye contact I made.
I had dreams where she could walk through walls and disappear into shadows. That phantom woman haunted me less than the mortal one. Dahra had a way of seeing me at my worst and assuming it was my best. She would burst in on me in the bath and scold me for scratching at the bug bites on my neck. When I was eating she would materialise beside me and force the fork into a different grip. Other apprentices walked to their lessons with smiles on their faces, and were given sweets and gentle words as they learned from their Mistresses. They were praised for their talents. Dahra only noticed my flaws.
One night, Dahra came into my room. I did not want to get out of the warm nest of blankets, so I squeezed my eyes shut. The witch stood beside my bed while I pretended to be asleep. I thought I had gotten away with it, but the next morning she took me away from my dancing class. She took me to my room, and then made me undress and lie under the covers.
“You must be convincing.” she told me. “If I can see that you’re pretending, then anyone can.”
I doubted that; Dahra’s eyes were so sharp they could cut through marble. “No-one is going to watch me sleep!”
“They might, but that’s not the point.” The woman perched on the edge of the mattress and absently inspected my nails. “Tonight I will come into your room. If I think you are asleep, I will whisper a se
cret. Of course, I don’t want a little girl to know my secrets! So if it looks like you’re awake, I will not say a word.”
I must have looked confused, because her perfect skin creased a little in a smile. It wasn’t a happy expression. “When I learned this lesson, Mistress Miette forbade the cook to feed me until I could tell her the password. I was licking crumbs off the tables before I finally got it right.”
“Are you going to do that to me?” I whimpered, feeling my stomach already starting to rumble in sympathy. Dahra looked away, and then patted my blanket down flat.
“Learn quickly, and I will not have to.”
I lost weight that month.
Dahra wasn’t the only one to watch me. The old women constantly pointed out differences in my body. They sent me for new clothes as soon as they started looking short, even though they would have lasted me for many more months. I became used to wearing gowns that always fit me perfectly. I could not eat too much, or the fitted bodices would gape at the seams – and I could not skip a meal, or the fabric would hang too loosely. Every other apprentice shared my misery. We were measured so often that we could recite the numbers – not only our heights, but idiotic facts like the distances between our chins and our collar bones, or the space between our thighs.
The servants treated us like this for two reasons. The first was to get us used to seeing our bodies as simple objects. The second was to cure us of any bashfulness we had left. Any girl who crossed her arms over her body was scolded; an apprentice who blushed when her inseam was measured was pinched by reproving fingers. We learned, and soon forgot that it was a lesson. We traded our modesty for pride, enjoying the slippery silks and soft cottons, begging the old women to use the same risqué patterns the Siren wore. We flaunted ourselves like peacocks. Our bodies began to change and the strings of numbers grew uneven as we realized we could no longer share each other’s clothes. In twos, twenties and twelves, we began to grow up.
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