Anyway, it was new for me still, there beyond the mudwife’s pigs, this knowing where we were—though I had lost count of the days since Ardblarthen when it had come to me how Grinnan looked up to find his way, not down among a million tree roots that all looked the same, among twenty million grass stalks, among twenty million million stones or sand grains. It was even newer how the star pattern and the moon movements had steadied out of their meaningless whirling and begun to tell me whereabouts I was in the wide world. All my life I had been stupid, trying to mark the things around me on the ground, leaving myself trails to get home by because every tree looked the same to me, every knoll and declivity, when all the time the directions were hammered hard into their system up there, pointing and changing-but-never-completely-changing.
So if we came at the cottage from this angle, whereas Kirtle and I came from the front, that means…but Kirtle and I wandered so many days, didn’t we? I filled my stomach with earths, but Kirtle was piteous weeping all the way, so hungry. She would not touch the earth; she watched me eating it and wept. I remember, I told her, No wonder you are thirsty! Look how much water you’re wasting on those tears! She had brown hair, I remember. I remember her pushing it out of her eyes so that she could see to sweep in the dark cottage—the cottage where the mudwife’s voice is rising, like a saw through wood.
The house stands glittering and the sound comes out of it. My mouth waters; they wouldn’t hear me over that noise, would they?
I creep in past the pigs to where the blobby roof edge comes low. I break off a blob bigger than my hand; the wooden shingle it was holding slides off, and my other hand catches it soundlessly and leans it against the house. The mudwife howls; something is knocked over in there; she howls again and Grinnan is grunting with the effort of something. I run away from all those noises, the white mud in my hand like a hunk of cake. I run back to the trees where Grinnan told me to stay, where the woman’s howls are like mouse squeaks and I can’t hear Grinnan, and I sit between two high roots and I bite in.
Once I’ve eaten the mud I’m ready to sleep. I try dozing, but it’s not comfortable among the roots there, and there is still noise from the cottage—now it is Grinnan working himself up, calling her all the things he calls me, all the insults. You love it, he says, with such deep disgust. You filth, you filthy cunt. And she oh’s below, not at all like me, but as if she really does love it. I lie quiet, thinking, Is it true, that she loves it? That I do? And if it’s true, how is it that Grinnan knows, but I don’t? She makes noise, she agrees with whatever he says. Harder, harder, she says. Bang me till I burst. Harder! On and on they go, until I give up waiting—they will never finish!
I get up and go around the pigsty and behind the chicken house. There is a poor field there, pumpkins gone wild in it, blackberry bushes foaming dark around the edges. At least the earth might be softer here. If I pile up enough of this floppy vine, if I gather enough pumpkins around me—
And then I am holding not a pale baby pumpkin in my hand, but a pale baby skull.
Grinnan and the mudwife bellow together in the house, and something else crashes broken.
The skull is the colour of white mud, but hard, inedible—although when I turn it in the moonlight I find tooth marks where someone has tried.
The shouts go up high—the witch’s loud, Grinnan’s whimpering.
I grab up a handful of earth to eat, but a bone comes with it, long, white, dry. I let the earth fall away from it.
I crouch there looking at the skull and the bone, as those two finish themselves off in the cottage.
They will sleep now—but I’m not sleepy anymore. The stars in their map are nailed to the inside of my skull; my head is filled with dark clarity. When I am sure they are asleep, I scoop up a mouthful of earth, and start digging.
Let me go and get the mudwife, our father murmured. Just for this once.
I’ve done it twice and I’ll do it again. Don’t you bring that woman here! Our mother’s voice was all constricted, as if the baby were trying to come up her throat, not out her nethers.
But this is not like the others! he said, desperate after the following pain. They say she knows all about children. Delivers them all the time.
Delivers them? She eats them! said our mother. It’s not just this one. I’ve two others might catch her eye, while I feed and doze. I’d rather die than have her near my house, that filthy hag.
So die she did, and our new brother or sister died as well, still inside her. We didn’t know whichever it was. Will it be another little Kirtle-child? our father had asked us, bright-eyed by the fire at night. Or another baby woodcutter, like our Hans? It had seemed so important to know. Even when the baby was dead, I wanted to know.
But the whole reason! our father sobbed. Is that it could not come out, for us to see! Which had shamed me quiet.
And then later, going into blackened towns where the only way you could tell man from woman was by the style of a cap, or a hair ribbon draggling into the dirt beneath them, or a rotted pinafore, or worst by the amount of shrunken scrag between an unclothed person’s legs—why, then I could see how small a thing it was not to know the little one’s sex. I could see that it was not important at all.
When I wake up, they are at it again with their sexing. My teeth are stuck to the inside of my cheeks and lips by two ridges of earth. I have to break the dirt away with my finger.
What was I thinking, last night? I sit up. The bones are in a pile beside me; the skulls are in a separate pile—for counting, I remember. What I thought was: Where did she find all these children? Kirtle and I walked for days, I’m sure. There was nothing in the world but trees and owls and foxes and that one deer. Kirtle was afraid of bats at night, but I never saw even one. And we never saw people—which was what we were looking for, which was why we were so unwise when we came upon the mudwife’s house.
But what am I going to do? What was I planning, piling these up? I thought I was only looking for all Kirtle’s bits. But then another skull turned up and I thought, Well, maybe this one is more Kirtle’s size, and then skull after skull—I dug on, crunching earth and drooling and breathing through my nose, and the bones seemed to rise out of the earth at me, seeking out the moon the way a tree reaches for the light, pushing up thinly among the other trees until it finds light enough to spread into, seeking out me, as if they were thinking, Here, finally, is someone who can do something for us.
I pick up the nearest skull. Which of these is my sister’s? Even if there were just a way to tell girls’ skulls from boys’! Is hers even here? Maybe she’s still buried, under the blackberries where I couldn’t go for thorns.
Now I have a skull in either hand, like someone at a market weighing one cabbage against another. And the thought comes to me: Something is different. Listen.
The pigs. The mudwife, her noises very like the pigs’. There is no rhythm to them; they are random grunting and gasping. And I—
Silently I replace the skulls on the pile.
I haven’t heard Grinnan this morning. Not a word, not a groan. Just the woman. The woman and the pigs.
The sunshine shows the cottage as the hovel it is, its saggy sides propped, its sloppy roofing patched with mud splats simply thrown from the ground. The back door stands wide, and I creep up and stand right next to it, my back to the wall.
Wet slaps and stirrings sound inside. The mudwife grunts—she sounds muffled, desperate. Has he tied her up? Is he strangling her? There’s not a gasp or word from him. That thing in the cage gives off a noise, though, a kind of low baying. It never stops to breathe. There is a strong smell of shit. Dawn is warming everything up; flies zoom in and out the doorway.
I press myself to the wall. There is a dip in the doorstep. Were I brave enough to walk in, that’s where I would put my foot. And right at that place appears a drop of blood, running from inside. It slides into the dip, pauses modestly at being seen, then shyly hurries across the step and dives into hiding in the weeds b
elow.
How long do I stand there, looking out over the pigsty and the chicken house to the forest, wishing I were there among the trees instead of here clamped to the house wall like one of those gargoyles on the monks’ house in Devilstown, with each sound opening a new pocket of fear in my bowels? A fly flies into my gaping mouth and out again. A pebble in the wall digs a little chink in the back of my head, I’m pressed so hard there.
Finally, I have to know. I have to take one look before I run, otherwise I’ll dream all the possibilities for nights to come. She’s not a witch; she can’t spell me back; I’m thin now and nimble; I can easily get away from her.
So I loosen my head, and the rest of me, from the wall. I bend one knee and straighten the other, pushing my big head, my popping eyes, around the doorpost.
I only meant to glimpse and run. So ready am I for the running, I tip outward even when I see there’s no need. I put out my foot to catch myself, and I stare.
She has her back to me, her bare, dirty white back, her baggy arse and thighs. If she weren’t doing what she’s doing, that would be horror enough, how everything is wet and withered and hung with hair, how everything shakes.
Grinnan is dead on the table. She has opened his legs wide and eaten a hole in him, in through his soft parts. She has pulled all his innards out onto the floor, and her bare bloody feet are trampling the shit out of them, her bare shaking legs are trying to brace themselves on the slippery carpet of them. I can smell the salt fish in the shit; I can smell the yellow spice.
That devilish moan, up and down it wavers, somewhere between purr and battle-yowl. I thought it was me, but it’s that shadow in the cage, curling over and over itself like a ruffle of black water, its eyes fixed on the mess, hungry, hungry.
The witch pulls her head out of Grinnan for air. Her head and shoulders are shiny red; her soaked hair drips; her purple-brown nipples point down into two hanging rubies. She snatches some air between her red teeth and plunges in again, her head inside Grinnan like the bulge of a dead baby, but higher, forcing higher, pummelling up inside him, fighting to be un-born.
In my travels I have seen many wrongnesses done, and heard many others told of with laughter or with awe around a fire. I have come upon horrors of all kinds, for these are horrible times. But never has a thing been laid out so obvious and ongoing in its evil before my eyes and under my nose and with the flies feasting even as it happens. And never has the means to end it hung as clearly in front of me as it hangs now, on the wall, in the smile of the mudwife’s ax edge, fine as the finest nail paring, bright as the dawn sky, the only clean thing in this foul cottage.
I reach my father’s house late in the afternoon. How I knew the way, when years ago you could put me twenty paces into the trees and I’d wander lost all day, I don’t know; it just came to me. All the loops I took, all the mistakes I made, all laid themselves down in their places on the world, and I took the right way past them and came here straight, one sack on my back, the other in my arms.
When I dreamed of this house it was big and full of comforts; it hummed with safety; the spirit of my mother lit it from inside like a sacred candle. Kirtle was always here, running out to greet me all delight.
Now I can see the poor place for what it is, a plague-ruin like so many that Grinnan and I have found and plundered. And tiny—not even as big as the witch’s cottage. It sits in its weedy quiet and the forest chirps around it. The only thing remarkable about it is that I am the first here; no one has touched the place. I note it on my star map—there is safety here, the safety of a distance greater than most robbers will venture.
A blackened boy-child sits on the step, his head against the doorpost as if only very tired. Inside, a second child lies in a cradle. My father and second mother are in their bed, side by side just like that lord and lady on the stone tomb in Ardblarthen, only not so neatly carved or richly dressed. Everything else is exactly the same as Kirtle and I left it. So sparse and spare! There is nothing of value here. Grinnan would be angry. Burn these bodies and beds, boy! he’d say. We’ll take their rotten roof if that’s all they have.
“But Grinnan is not here, is he?” I say to the boy on the step, carrying the mattock out past him. “Grinnan is in the ground with his ladylove, under the pumpkins. And with a great big pumpkin inside him, too. And Mrs. Pumpkin-Head in his arms, so that they can sex there underground forever.”
I take a stick and mark out the graves: Father, Second Mother, Brother, Sister—and a last big one for the two sacks of Kirtle-bones. There’s plenty of time before sundown, and the moon is bright these nights, don’t I know it. I can work all night if I have to; I am strong enough, and full enough still of disgust. I will dig and dig until this is done.
I tear off my shirt.
I spit in my hands and rub them together.
The mattock bites into the earth.
Shira
Lavie Tidhar
Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, lived in Israel and South Africa, traveled widely in Africa and Asia, and has lived in London for a number of years. He currently lives in Vanuatu, an island-nation in the South Pacific. He is the winner of the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury Prize (awarded by the European Space Agency), is the editor of the anthology A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults, and is the author of the novella “An Occupation of Angels.” His stories appear in SCI FICTION, Strange Horizons, ChiZine, Fantasy Magazine, Postscripts, Clarkesworld Magazine, and many others, and in translation in seven languages.
Tidhar’s alternate history provocatively removes one of the flashpoints of world politics in order to imagine a better future for all.
Shira n. (Hebrew: )
1. Singing; Poetry; (Biblical) Song
2. A contemporary girl’s name
Nur remembered a paragraph from one of Tirosh’s poems, from the single book he published, two years before the twentieth century came to an end: “The morning rises: another train station. The skies are a dark blue and the streetlamps are lit; people, like the sunken chests of ancient treasures, sit in their depths. It is too early to begin a rescue operation: for a short while, before the sun rises, we are alone.” She didn’t like the imagery, did not find in it the originality required to make the poem anything other than minor, but still…she thought about it now, because in his way Tirosh had captured, in the poem, a certain essence of what it meant to travel alone.
Damascus Station had an official name that was not used; for the city’s residents, at least, it had only one name, a linguistic combination that made those few who protected the language grow angry every time it was used: Dimashq-Central. Through the station’s transparent dome the sky appeared almost purple, and the cold air-conditioned atmosphere raised expectations for another day of khamsin. Nur thought she’d be glad not to be in the city during the heat wave but now, before boarding the train, a ticket in her hand and a small, friendly suitcase following her devoutly, she no longer knew how she felt.
Even at such an early hour of the morning there were people at the station, and a few shops were open. Nur bought the morning edition of Al-Iktissadiya and then, on her way to the platform, discovered a small branch of Steimatzky. She had once read that one of the first branches of Steimatzky, that conglomerate of Hebrew booksellers, was in Damascus, in the early years of the twentieth century, an interesting fact without much practical use, one of the many she had collected at the university. Still, something in the historical connection attracted her, and on the spur of the moment she entered the shop.
Unlike the large bookshops in the city centre, this one was in effect a hole in the wall, dark in the way of secondhand bookshops and with the same dry smell in the air. An employee who seemed no more than eighteen napped behind a counter, and the shop was otherwise empty. Nur went straight to the poetry shelves. The books appeared not used but merely old, as if they had been sitting on the shelves for a very long time without buyers or readers. But most of the poetry was modern, a poetry-of-After, and Nur was never a
ble to get excited over modern Hebrew poetry. Poetry of the end of the twentieth century, of the fin de siècle, was her interest, and within it her dissertation focused on that unknown poet, Lior Tirosh, whose only book, Remnants of God, she had found by chance in the flea market of Damascus and of which she had not since seen another copy. If only she could use the database of the Hebrew Library in Jerusalem…but of course, the Small Holocaust prevented that years ago.
She left the shop without a book and went to platform eighteen, the terminal for Haifa. The train was a many-eyed silver bullet. Dark windows seemed to her like mirrorshades. She found her carriage and climbed onboard.
At this early hour the number of passengers travelling to Haifa was small. Nur sat by herself in a seat by the window and waited for her journey to start.
The suitcase followed her to the train and now waited politely by her feet. Nur motioned for it to come closer and took out the book. It was this book that pushed her to go to this city, which she had never before visited. A book no one knew but her, or so it had seemed since she found it, while working on the completion of her thesis, “On the Vision of the Small Holocaust in the Work of Lior Tirosh.”
Remnants of God. The title, as ostentatious as it was, seemed to her merely a sign of youth, the sophomore title of a young—though talented—poet. Nur had found it in Ismail Emporium, a secondhand bookshop by the university. A slim volume in hardcover, and the date, in Roman numerals as ostentatious as the title, was MCMXCVIII. The name of the poet was unfamiliar to her, and the mark of the year—was that really a first edition, a poetry book from before the Small Holocaust?—made her shiver, and bargain almost angrily with the bookseller. Ismail, in the end, gave her the book almost for free—“Who buys Hebrew poetry, who? Only your crowd at the university, and you don’t have money anyhow”—and Nur took it to her small room in the university buildings and began to read the poems.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 21