Mire

by Vivien Leanne Saunders

  The servants said that Dahra kept the severed hand as a memento. She was more than capable of it. The High Mistress said that it had been an accident, and so she was lenient. Dahra came to her next class with cane marks on her hands and fresh blood seeping from her wound. She seemed as serene as ever.

  We never saw Harriet again.

  CHAPTER 11

  A few weeks later the senior class was ordered to fetch their night clothes and gather in the largest classroom. When we heard this we burst into confused whispers. We had never been allowed into the classrooms after sunset. We grabbed our nightdresses and lingered in the corridor until one of the teachers shouted at us for blocking the hallway. We reluctantly pushed the door open, and our confusion grew worse.

  Eighteen mattresses were lying on the floor – one for each of us. Dahra was standing in the middle of the circle with three of the old women and another Siren who we did not recognise. There was a serving table along one wall stacked with rags, towels, pitchers of water and chipped clay bowls. We gathered by the doorway in our nervous clot, staring around with wide eyes.

  One of the old women muttered something, and Dahra smirked back. The crone only had one tooth left in her shrivelled mouth.

  “Pick a bed, put on your nightdresses and sit down.” Dahra ordered us. We shuffled forwards. She cleared her throat, and we scuttled faster. I chose the bed farthest away from the door. I stripped, dragged my nightshirt on and sat down. The room was cold, but the bed had no blanket. I wrapped my arms around my knees.

  Dahra turned around slowly, making sure that every girl in the circle was watching her.

  “The idiots outside the island call us witches. They hear the word potion and think that we whisper incantation over brandy. You’re right to laugh! It’s not true. We use seeds, mushrooms, sap and venom. Each combination does something different. A single misjudged measure can mean the difference between euphoria and death.” her eyes grew dark. “You’ve all seen what a single mistake can do.”

  We nodded. The silence was so thick it was hard to breathe. Dahra smiled.

  “There is no magic in our arts. Chanting will not make the potions stronger. Praying and pleading will not make them less dangerous. They are all exactly as they are made to be.” she reached into her pocket and drew out a silk bag. “You need to know exactly what will happen when you use these drugs. You need to know how a drugged man feels, so that you can comfort him or laugh with him. You need to know how they twist your mind, so that even if you take them you can stay alert.”

  She pulled a clay vial out of the bag and un-stoppered it. A strong smell of honey flooded the room. We all sighed at the lovely scent and then choked back the sound when Dahra looked around at us. She clearly wanted one of us to volunteer, but nobody made eye contact with her. The woman glared at me. I assume she took my cowardice as a personal slight. She stalked over to me and raised my chin with her sharp fingernails. She pinched my nose until I was forced to swallow. The liquid was so sweet that it burned my throat.

  The other apprentices stared at me. I think they expected me to start twitching, as Harriet had. Instead, a wonderful feeling started drifting through my body. I raised my hands. It was as if I could see the potion being carried through every vein. Whenever it reached the ends of my fingers it tickled. I laughed giddily and lay back. A fly was buzzing around the ceiling. I stared at it for so long that I felt like I was flying, too. Then I was back in the river, rocking and swaying in my coffin as it bore me through sunlight and moonlight, snow and apple blossom until I took a deep breath and sank down into the sky.

  The fresh air turned into putrid smoke. I groaned and twisted onto my side, but I threw up before I made it to the clay bowl they had given me. The candlelight burned my eyes and I squeezed them shut. I could hear other people vomiting nearby.

  The servants brought us food at sunrise. None of us could bear to eat it. The women waved toast in front of our noses and cackled when we vomited up stinging bile. When the bell chimed for the first lesson of the new day, Dahra returned with another glass bottle. Some of the girls started to sob.

  The woman looked around at us and raised her eyebrows. “What, not feeling well?”

  A series of groans answered her. Dahra treated us to one of her rare laughs. “The pleasure drugs are addictive. The island was almost ruined by them. Endless Siren lay around getting fat and lazy while their minds rotted. We started adding a little extra bite to them. You can drink Honey Liquor as often as you like, but you will always pay for it in the morning.”

  “If you drink more liquor then you’ll feel good again, but the next headache will be ten times as bad.” The toothless crone added in a mushy voice. She glanced at Dahra. “An addict will do anything for another mouthful.”

  Dahra looked around the room. “I hope I don’t have to prove that, girls. Cleansing an addict is boring for us and agonising for you.”

  Our heads were already spinning. I could not imagine how it could be ten times worse.

  Dahra carried around the second bottle. This time she did not have to hold my nose to make me drink, but my eyes pleaded with her as she walked towards me. The new potion tasted of stale water. I gagged, wondering what awful thing it would do to me, when suddenly my head cleared. The stabbing lights left my eyes, and I looked around in wonder.

  “This is an antidote.” Dahra folded her arms until we stopped whispering, “Every potion has a shadow. Be wary; eating seeded bread or mushrooms after taking a drug can make it twice as pleasant, or twice as dangerous. Even the antidotes have side effects.” she pointed to me and gestured for me to stand. My nightdress stuck to my skin; I was so soaked in sweat that the fabric was see-through. Humiliated, I crouched back down again.

  Having proven her point, our teacher gave us permission to eat and visit the privy. She was holding another potion when we returned. The bag clinked heavily at her side.

  “How many more are there?” Someone asked. Normally, they would have been slapped for speaking without permission, but what Dahra did was far worse. She met the girl’s eyes, and smiled. Her teeth were so white that they looked sharp, and her face glowed with pure happiness. Then she looked away, but she did not bother to hide her delight when she un-stoppered the new bottle.

  “This,” she said, “is scorsten. It’s made from calla lily and inkweed.”

  We stayed in that room for weeks. An endless stream of servants spooned water into our paralysed bodies and caught us when we danced and laughed hysterically. They held our hair when we vomited and slapped us when we complained. Dahra waited for us to recover between potions, but we had no real respite. For every intoxicating lozenge she fed us, she gave us a harmful tincture. We were fed the same potions prepared at three different heats. One might make us dizzy, but the one that had been prepared a few degrees cooler made our throats close up. Every vial was produced with the same warnings. If you make a mistake, this is how you will suffer. This is how you will die.

  Anyone who became genuinely sick was taken away to the medical wing. Anyone who screamed and held their breath when told to drink was taken to their Mistress to be punished. They would be sent down into the lower class and, a year later, suffer through every potion again. If they still refused, they would be sent away from the training wing and put to work in the kitchens or laundries.

  Some girls preferred it. There were ancient servants who could still name the potion which had finally driven them away. I was too stubborn to quit, but by the end of the week I felt like every part of my body had been wrung out like a rag.

  On the last day I counted ten empty mattresses, and caught my breath. I remembered playing chase with crowds of laughing children when I had first arrived at the island. There were only eight of us left. The other girls looked at me and looked away. They all hated me, now. Dahra was my Mistress; it was my fault she was there. Afterwards, we found out that she had run the class for years. It didn’t make any difference; I was tarnished by association. There were ei
ght of us left, and I was completely alone.

  Dahra produced one last bottle. The silken bag she had started with was completely empty. The mixtures she had fed to us so far were worth a king’s ransom, but this last one was worth his crown.

  “I cannot explain to you what this one does. It’s better for you just to drink it. When it wears off you are free to go.”

  We looked at each other nervously, but we drank the potion without asking any questions. Dahra knelt beside me when she fed me the last of it, and touched my cheek with awkward affection.

  “I’m going now. Find me when you’re done and we’ll talk about it.”

  “Talk about what?” I mumbled, feeling the now-familiar slow warmth sliding through my limbs.

  I was used to my teacher’s vague scowls by now, but it took me a moment to shake off my irritation after she shrugged and left. I lay down and thought about how the other girls’ Mistresses had sat by their beds and held their hands. Hadn’t I been just as obedient? Hadn’t I earned that little bit of love? I seethed for a long time: an angry mind buzzing around a warm, sleepy body. My thoughts started to drift, and I stretched luxuriously against the mattress. Perhaps the potion was putting me to sleep, or giving me beautiful dreams. I closed my eyes and stretched again, and then caught my breath. My nightshirt had brushed against my skin as I moved, and the soft touch was delicious. I tried to move again, biting my lip, and the friction of the mattress against my back made me arch up like a cat. It was almost too much to bear. I lay as still as possible and held my breath.

  The tingling feeling ebbed from my bare toes to the base of my throat, and with my eyes squeezed shut I could feel it whispering soft fingertips towards my thighs, and then higher, until I was squeezing my legs together as hard as I could to try to force it away. The tickling feeling faded and I breathed out, then squeaked in surprise as it came back stronger than before and started to throb under my skin. I moaned and arched up from the mattress, forgetting about resisting it and giving in to the warm, insistent pulse which grew and grew until I thought that I would die. The sensation suddenly flared inside me. I cried out and pressed my hands between my legs, against the thrumming pulse, and my body answered it with its own tremors until, slowly – wonderfully slowly – it drew away. I curled up on the bed and covered my face with my hands, panting and shivering, until my legs stopped shaking and I could sit up.

  None of us could meet each other’s eyes as we left, but we couldn’t hide the smiles on our faces.

  “That potion is only for the Mainlanders.” Dahra told me, “Every idiot apprentice tries to beg me for more. It’s addictive and dangerous, like every other drug. It’s a useful tool, nothing more.”

  I blushed, but for the first time in my life I couldn’t let the subject drop. “There were other potions that felt good. They’re nothing like… but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t… why do we need to save it for the Mainlanders?”

  She grinned, and the mischievous expression made her look much younger. “Some people cannot feel like that without help. The servants beg me for it, but I tell them to find some muira puama and brew their own.”

  “Don’t you always need a potion?” I asked. I was so naive that I honestly thought that the sensation was something you had to drink. The woman pulled a face at my ignorance, and then laughed.

  “Welcome to the most frustrating months of your life.”

  You might think this was when my life became very sordid, but the Siren had been training young women for so many centuries that they had somehow managed to make sex as boring as every other lesson. In a way, that was good. The outright fascination we had about our bodies soon became commonplace. We read dry books, made notes in endless lectures about our bodies, and scrawled crude jokes onto the clinical diagrams Mistress Lorna drew on the blackboard. I knew almost everything mechanically important within a few days.

  None of it taught me how it would feel. I couldn’t pair the clumsy, visceral reality of it with the idea of the graceful, seductive Siren. I thought Dahra must have played a cruel trick on me. Something so obscene couldn’t possibly create the blissful warmth of her potion.

  I longed for that warmth. I would wake up with my heart pounding, my hands pressed against my stomach as if they could ease the pressure inside of me. I would twist and turn and roll my hips into the mattress until wakeful humiliation made me weep. I saw that the other apprentice’s eyes were just as red and sleepy as my own, but none of us talked about it. We had passed Dahra’s test, but all it had left us with was the dull certainty that something was missing in our lives. We were suddenly dissatisfied with the routine which had amused us for so many years. The friendships we had made with the younger girls broke down, and we worked more seriously towards graduating from our apprenticeships.

  I confess that I was not too studious to discover ways to ease the ache in my body. The old women enjoyed slamming open our bedroom doors without warning. They punished us by whipping our fingers with thin willow sticks. Our nails bruised into a soft blue shade, and we had to wear it like a badge. All of the Mistresses smirked when they saw it.

  The one thing that could make the frustration worse was generously supplied by Dahra, who called me to the courtyard after dinner. She was carrying a cloak which she draped around my shoulders. It was one of her own – a lovely soft orange, embroidered with tiny white flowers. I had grown tall enough for it to fit me, and Dahra warned me to make sure it covered my leather boots while I walked. She pulled the hood over my hair, and told me that as long as I kept my face hidden and my boots covered I could pass for a Siren.

  We trudged down towards the docks. I had not been past the orchards since I was a child, and I trembled with excitement as the gardens became more fragrant around me. I sneaked a peek around me when Dahra stopped and murmured to one of the passing men. His face was gnarled like a peanut shell, and his missing teeth made spittle spray from his mouth with every word. I shivered and looked back down again.

  My Mistress took me into the bathhouse. It was the first time I had seen the Siren’s side of it. I was dumbstruck by its beauty. Every coloured tile had a soft sheen that made me think of raindrops in sunlight. The air smelled like clean water and perfume. Great bathing pools filled in the main room, and I quickly averted my eyes from the men and women relaxing in them. They did not wash in the separate tin tubs that we used in the apprentice pool. There were wine glasses and plates of sweets lying on the tiles, and the Siren laughed and splashed each other in a way that was forbidden on the other side of the wall. I stared at them for a moment, and then caught sight of one of the men. He was naked, and I honestly thought he was deformed. I took an unconscious step forward, trying to make out what I was looking at, until Dahra grabbed my wrist and dragged me away.

  We crossed through the main room into a smaller corridor. Most of the doors were ornate, leading to private bathing and steam rooms, but there was a cleaning closet at the end of the row marked by a smaller wooden frame. We shuffled into the small space, and the woman showed me a wooden shutter on the wall.

  “Only open that when it’s dark in here, or they’ll see.” she whispered. “Don’t make a sound, just watch. I have to work, but I’ll be back to collect you when my man falls asleep. If you think someone is coming then lock the door. The women will not bother you, but sometimes the men get lost.”

  “What am I watching?” I asked. She sighed and shook her head.

  “How can you be so dense? We taught you how to speak and how to listen. You know how to read someone’s eyes, and you learned everything you need to do to turn a man’s heart. Sometimes that’s enough, but if it is not this is what you have to do next. Watch what she does.” she stopped and then added snidely. “Don’t get too distracted, Clay. I’ll be asking you whether he honestly answered her questions, not whether he was on top.”

  She left, laughing at my bewildered expression, and I grit my teeth before I could say something rude in reply. The closet smelled of soap an
d lye, but there was a pile of towels which I hauled over to the shutter. If I was going to be here all night then I might as well be comfortable. I heard a soft noise from the next room and quickly shut the door, locking it before feeling my way to the shutter. I slid it open as quietly as I could and peeked out.

  I looked into a steam room, but the fires had burned low enough that the surfaces weren’t blisteringly hot. A woman was leading a man onto a bench, talking to him the whole time. I listened to the stream of words, wondering how she had gotten away with chattering like that when she was an apprentice. We were told off if we wasted words, but the woman seemed to overflow with them. The man’s eyes flickered at certain words. He humoured her by saying yes at mechanical intervals. I felt sorry for him. He looked bored.

  I was too naïve to recognise the desperation on the Siren’s face. She had tried everything, and the man was indifferent to her. I was on the point of closing the shutter when the man sat up a little straighter and pressed his fingers to the woman’s mouth, silencing her. I expected the woman to be angry, but she closed her eyes and raised her hand to his own. Slowly, not opening her eyes, she drew one of his fingers into her mouth and sucked at it.

  The man made a strange sound. I wondered how often he washed his hands.

  The woman let his fingers fall away, and moved closer to him. He watched her for a long time, his eyes trailing over the white curves of her body until she stood up and peeled her damp dress away from her skin. His expression did not change at her nakedness, but he stood up and placed his hands on her shoulders. Neither of them said anything – they barely made any noise at all – and I wondered how on earth they knew what they were doing. The man guided the woman down onto the bench, and kissed her throat while her hands pushed down his breeches. Then he made a single movement – a smooth, rolling surge – and as the woman gasped I felt an answering dart of desire stabbing into my body.