Deliverance

by Samantha Schinder

  ***

  It was not a fortnight later that Cat’s prediction proved tragically accurate.

  Deliverance was occupied sharpening her axe, sparks leaping from the spinning stone wheel like fireflies darting in the glade, when her mother came stomping back into the homestead. Deliverance did not raise her eyes from her task. It was still late summer, but the solstice had long past and the days had begun to wane. It was as if the winter were pulling all the energy it needed to sustain itself just a bit ahead of the event. The onset of colder weather was never quite predictable on the isle. It would not do to be without enough wood for the harsher months. Deliverance prided herself on her axe swing. She had rippling muscles beneath her homespun tunic and could put away enough wood easily for herself and her mother. She swung, and sweated, and stacked all the daylight hours, pausing briefly for refreshment but not needing much respite. Physical strength meant independence, and that was something she prized above all. She mused her grandmother, aptly named Independence, would approve had she not passed onto the side of the Fades. Perhaps she could still approve from her spot amongst the Fields in the afterlight of the Fades, if such a thing were possible.

  Once her axe was honed again, Deliverance planned to continue her war on the felled pine logs littering in the yard. But Cat had other plans for her daughter’s attentions.

  “Girl, have ye not heeded a good word I just said?” Cat chastised her impatiently. It was only then Deliverance realized her mother was ranting. For Gods’ fury, she was just trying to prepare them for winter’s coming. What in The Hunter’s name was she chattering on about?

  “Apologies, Mother. I could not hear you over the grinding stone,” Deliverance said, halting her peddling on the foot wheel. The fireflies died with the smile in her greeting, when she caught the look on her mother’s face. Something was terribly amiss. “What’s happened?”

  “What’s happened is that Effie could not keep her fury-fated mouth shut. Gods’ teeth!” Cat swore. Deliverance felt a pit growing in her stomach. Her mother rarely swore.

  Deliverance set down the axe and swiped the glistening condensation from her brow, leaving a darker stain against the beige of her spun tunic. “Tell me what’s happened.”

  “I know Effie must have felt something for that Tobin boy, the young one, them both being orphans. She must have felt duty-bound to protect the lad, him only being but twelve, but oh, she’s gone about it all wrong. It is not going to end well for her,” Cat stammered, shaking her head. She related the story in pieces Deliverance had to mash together like the dovetail joints of a wood project. Her eyes widened as she listened, and she felt like she might be sick.

  Apparently, Effie had come upon the Abbot in a compromising position with Tobin, the prepubescent orphan boy. She’d snatched the tearful child back behind her and with a clawing slap, ripped her fingernails across the Abbot’s cheek. It was an outrage. Sodomy was highly forbidden in Narisi culture, and with one so young…it was a dangerous charge. But with the claw marks evident upon the Abbot’s visage, there was bound to be a scene.

  Deliverance didn’t have to speak for her mother to know she wanted to help her. Effie was her one and only friend—she couldn’t lose her over this.

  Wordlessly, she and her mother hastened across the isle on the backs of two of their larger ponies used for plowing. It was the fastest way to the village.

  “Had I been there, I would have counseled the foolish girl to take a different path,” Cat muttered as they rode. “I would have advised Effie to shuffle Tobin away and use the information as blackmail against the Abbot—write off her lashing out off as a fit of “swooning” or feminine irrationality. No, instead, Effie will be swept in front of a village tribunal for questioning. She will be called hastily by the Abbot before Effie could use her gift to influence the outcome. In the Abbot’s mind, as a man of authority, his will I”s predestined to be delivered. Effie sealed her fate when she pointed her finger and named the man a sodomite, a molester of young boys.”

  It was not the jarring plodding of the pinto pony’s trot that grew the massive knot in Deliverance’s stomach. By the time the ponies bumped into the main stretch of the village, everyone had already congregated in the Great Hall in the center of town, collocated with the Abbey. Cat and her mother had to jam elbow to wrestle their way into a position in which they could see the proceedings. Dusk was beginning to fall, but the hall was bright, humming with activity when the world should be beginning to fall asleep.

  Effie was held at the front on the dais to the left of the center pulpit. The Abbot had positioned himself next to, but not upon, the pulpit at the front of the hall. During the winter months, long tables were erected in the hall to serve as a gathering spot for the village, a place to share banquets and company. This happened only on special occasions, though; the men preferred to cloister themselves away in the Men’s Hall, receiving and vetting news and doing whatever it was they did in the hall. The women, in turn, kept to the Women’s Hall, preferring its sanctity and comfort. The tables had been shoved to the sides of the hall, although several villagers took to standing on them to gain a better point of view.

  Effie stood defiantly with her pointed chin aloft, her russet locks cascading down her back like sea serpents. The Abbot, for all the seriousness of the charges levied against him, did not seem concerned. Instead he stood with his hands clasped, a self-satisfied smirk alighting his pinched features. It was incongruous with the raw, crimson lash marks dug into his cheek.

  Deliverance and her mother pushed farther forward, until Effie was able to see and meet their eyes. Only then did Deliverance see a small faltering in her friend’s bravado. But it was gone as soon as it appeared, snatched into the overwarm ambient air.

  They must have missed the formal accusations, Deliverance realized. “What’s happening?” her mother whispered to the baker’s wife, Dolce, who was squashed next to them in the crowd.

  “She accused Abbot Richard of…terrible things. Heinous acts with the Orphan Boy Tobin,” Dolce whispered back, not taking her eyes off the scene at the front of the hall.

  “And what of the boy?” Cat hissed. “Where is he?”

  “They took him up front to question him, but he would not say either way. Just stared at the ground like he was possessed by daemons. Would not even respond to his name. So they questioned him louder, and then the boy pissed himself. He just stood there in it as the puddle grew on the floor. They ushered him away after that. He looked up once at Effie and that was all the human things he did. Right unnatural.” The baker’s wife clucked her tongue like a fattened hen. Deliverance briefly wondered if hens could get genital warts, but then cast the irrelevant thought from her mind.

  “It was as I told ye,” Effie proclaimed, fists clenched. She had dug her heels in and was hankering for a fight. Deliverance knew the hot nature of her redheaded friend well.

  The Reeve, who was also the head Fishmonger, looked distinctly uncomfortable at the pulpit, having to undertake these delicate proceedings. He mopped beads of sweat from his generous, trenched brow, not bothering to re-pocket his handkerchief. The humidity caused by the closeness of the crowd in the room caused little half-moon fog clouds to form on his reading spectacles.

  “Yes, right…well,” he stammered, seeming unable to find somethin
g to do with his hands. At last he simply dropped them to his sides. “At this point in the proceedings, we must call the accused to make a statement on his own behalf. Abbot Richard?” The Reeve looked relieved to relinquish the pulpit stand to the Abbot, although traditionally an accused had to stand on the other side of the pulpit from the accuser. Yet Effie was occupying the accused’s side of the pulpit, on the left, not the accuser’s, on the right. Odd, thought Deliverance.

  The Abbot took the stand with ease, having spent every End Week’s Day blathering on about the God of Names and occasionally touching on the other gods briefly, from his usual pulpit at the Abbey adjacent to the hall. He did not appear phased in the slightest over the grotesque accusation Effie had levied against him. Deliverance did not like this one bit.

  They lived in a society where, though the women had small, magical name gifts, the men tightly controlled all. They ruled and directed and held sway. Women like Effie, with all her swagger and secrets, and Cat and Deliverance in their independent lifestyle, were oddities. Most were like dutiful Chastity, the Abbot’s daughter, who prayed and swept and hardly uttered a peep. Her head was perpetually bent in homage not to gods but to the other half. Deliverance shuddered at this. She much preferred her little cottage and her goats and her sometimes enigmatic mother over these lording, pedantic men.

  “It is perfectly normal…” the Abbot began, although his words caused a stir. Surely, he did not mean this gross behavior with the young boy. That was evil embodied, not normal. The pastor of his flock would not endorse such behavior, but all were quelled when he continued, weaving his plot like a snake through the rushes, “It is perfectly normal to accuse someone of something even more heinous when one is caught in an act of immorality. Indeed, it is natural for someone to attempt to defend herself in such a way after being discovered.”

  Discovered? What could he possibly mean? Was he not the one on trial? The Abbot was skilled at manipulating crowds, whereas Effie only swayed individuals. Crowds were another beast. And the Abbot was a professional.

  “Yes, to strike out and fabricate lies. These are the feminine recourses to avoid due punishment. So I was not surprised by Miss F***’s actions.” The Abbot paused for gasps because he’d used her traditional Name, the curse uttered by her delirious mother before her passing in childbirth. “She, being an orphan, has lacked for a mother to set an example and a father to lay discipline. Indeed, she must be dealt with leniency because of her troublesome upbringing. After all, we are not a harsh people. We often overlook the predilections of our neighbors, which may be slightly unorthodox, because we are magnanimous.”

  What on earth was he getting at? It had not gone unnoticed by Deliverance the Abbot had managed to turn the discussion around into some kind of counteraccusation against Effie.

  “And so, we must look at Miss Amity with this in mind as we discuss the true nature of events here,” the Abbot preached. A murmur arose through the crowd. Deliverance shook her head. What in the Fades did Amity have to do with any of this? Amity was, as her name gifted her, an amiable girl, but slow in nature. She still had not quite grasped the concept she had been named in the proceedings as the crowd turned their attention to the pie-faced girl.

  “Now Miss Amity, as her mother so graciously name gifted her, is the most accommodating amongst us. So, when Miss Effie made advances upon her…” The murmur rolling through the crowd became thunder. God’s teeth, Deliverance thought. “…Amity graciously tried to avoid the unwanted and unnatural attentions of the harlot. But of course, being as pugnacious as she is, Miss Effie would not take no for an answer, and thus I discovered her trying to force her lesbianism upon Miss Amity. Therefore, in a desperate act to save her own skin, she made up these ridiculous accusations against me, the witness to her disturbing, criminal behavior.”

  Effie’s defiance flattened like embers doused with a bucket. Her blue eyes widened in dismay. Hastily, she shot a glance to Deliverance and held her gaze for a moment, before returning her now unsteady attention to the magistrates of the proceedings.

  There was no quelling the crowd at this point. The hall erupted in chaos as the Reeve tried ineffectually to bring order several times before giving up and adjourning the session until the morrow. Effie, in shock, was led out the side entrance in shackles, shame raining upon her as the crowd hurled insults. “UNNATURAL WHORE!” “LESBIAN DAEMON!”

  Deliverance hissed at the young teenage girl next to her, who was hurtling insults at the top of her screechy lungs, to stop her foolishness. “Ye aught to be ashamed of yourself, Levity. You of all people should be able to discern the true nature of what is going on.” The girl, abashed, stopped her yelling and disappeared into the raucous crowd.

  “Come,” Deliverance’s mother commanded, grasping her hand and pulling her through the crowd. When they emerged a wall of cool air smashed into them, belaying the torpidity of the angry hall. “We must be gone.”

  “Be gone?” Deliverance protested, snatching her hand from her mother’s, who was leading her toward the ponies waiting in the village paddock for their return. “Are you mad? We have to go to Effie. She must be so frightened! We must help her!”

  Cat turned on her daughter in an instant, snapping, “And we will. But now is not the time, daughter. We must be gone from this place for the moment. It will do Effie precious little good if we are in shackles beside her. Come now.”

  Deliverance glanced from side to side, but her stomach deflated as she realized her mother was right. And so, they fled into the fallen night, the God of Horizons obscuring their trail.

  CHAPTER 4

  Deliverance

  “But we are going to help Effie?” Deliverance demanded, seeking assurances from her mother as they rambled into their homestead later that night. The moon overhead expended precious little light, hanging in the sky like a fingernail. The ponies were eager to return to their pasture lean-to and picked up their modest pace accordingly.

  “Hush, child. I am thinking,” Cat replied, danger flashing in her eyes. They remained silent as they slid the halters off the ponies and released them to go whiffle the backs of their compatriots and shift through the leftover hay.

  Back inside the cottage, Deliverance could not gain an easy position. The nervous energy within her would not allow her to sit, and so she paced, picking up this task and that, only to leave it half finished in a wake of more pacing. Cat sat silently, hands clasped, staring at the small fire she had stoked in the hearth.

  Finally, Deliverance could bear it no longer and burst out, “Well, what in the Fades are we going to do?”

  “Tis’ a delicate situation, daughter. Effie put herself in a precarious place accusing one of the most powerful men on the island of such an unforgivable act. They will converge upon her now she is in a weak stance,” said Cat stiffly, still staring into the yellow, licking flames of the fire.

  “What will they do to her?” Deliverance asked, the lump in her stomach from earlier in the night refusing to unknot. To her knowledge she had never seen a woman publicly punished. If she were found to be in transgression, a woman’s husband would surely handle the task at home. There were very few cases in which women on the island of Nar warranted notice, much less punishment. Although Effie did not have a man to rein her in. Nor did Deliverance and Cat.

  “If she is lucky, she wi
ll be given labors. Although I am not certain she will be,” Cat replied grimly.

  Deliverance’s eyes widened in shock. Labors were harsh toils sentenced upon men caught in crimes such as thievery. The men were sent to the island mine to labor for metals, without pay and with very little sustenance. The handful of other men who worked the mine as a trade were stingy with rest, water, and food. In Deliverance’s time, only a few men were sentenced to labors, one for thieving, and several others for violently brawling. They had not fared well during the labors, emerging emaciated with bouts of scurvy. Deliverance was not sure Effie could survive labors long.

  “Wait, you said if she is lucky? What else could possibly be worse than labors?” Deliverance asked, panic rising in her gullet. As far as she knew, the worst sentence that could be levied was labors, varying only in degrees of time to be served.

  Cat leveled a stare at her daughter. “They could put her to death.”

  Deliverance gasped. “Surely not! God’s teeth! How is it even possible to think such a heinous thing?” Did the Narisis even have a historical precedent for such brutish, crude law dealing?

  “Daughter, I think you will find people are capable of terrible deeds when power hangs in the balance. Effie, unfortunately, has more power than most here think a woman aught. The chance to dispose of the threat of her may prove too great.”

  Deliverance felt the energy drain from her body as she plopped into her chair beside her mother’s at the hearth. What a horrendous thought!

  “Surely the people would not tolerate such a sentence!” Deliverance exclaimed. She could not imagine the butcher, the baker, the blacksmith, the cartwright…any of the village men she had known since birth could be capable of allowing such a deed to take place in their midst. It was unspeakable.