Green

by Jay Lake

  “You remember nothing!” Her voice was a shriek as she dropped her hoe. “Listen to you. You don’t talk like a woman. Your voice is foreign. Your clothes are foreign. You don’t even walk like a woman!” Shar leaned close, her voice dropping to an angry hiss. “This is not your home. It is mine. Pinar . . .” She swallowed a sob, then continued. “Pinar, whatever is left of him, is my husband.”

  I don’t know what I’d hoped for in coming here. Certainly not a frightened, angry woman living with a man whose spirit had already departed from behind his eyes. The ditches where I’d swum and played were filled with dark water and stinking moss. Insects the size of my hand flitted among the plantains of my memory.

  Even Endurance was old.

  My heart crumbled. Before Shar, I swallowed my tears, but she must have read it on my face.

  “Go back to your city, little foreign girl. Leave us to starve in our own way. This land is not yours.” She spat in the water at my feet. “It never was.”

  I found a shard of courage. “Wh-what do you fear?”

  She looked at me as if I were stupid.

  “I d-do not know,” I said. “I do not know why you are so angry.”

  “Because, you fool, you came back. If the village elders believe you are his child, when he dies, all this land will be yours. They will marry you to a likely boy, and I will have nothing.”

  All what land, I thought. A pair of rice paddies and a half-rotten stand of plantains? Seen through the eyes of the Stone Coast, it was on the tip of my tongue to ask who would want this. But the answer was clear enough: Shar. The woman who fed and cleaned my father enough that he remained alive even in the grip of whatever madness had claimed him.

  Love? Or just inheritance?

  Wars had been fought over less, in the history of the Stone Coast.

  I understood my mistake then. Everything I cherished in memory had been a lie. If I’d stayed here, I’d have been as fat-bellied and skinny-legged as those children I’d passed. Or already married off, to get my hungry mouth out of the house. I’d spent years behind bluestone walls longing for what had been taken from me.

  My captors had been right. Rather, I should have been on my knees thanking the Factor for what he had taken me from.

  I reached out to touch her arm, soft as I knew to do it. “I do not want your land, Shar. I thought this was my h-home, but I was very far wrong. Th-thank you for caring for my papa.”

  Her eyes filled with tears then. “Go, then. Keep him in your mind however you remember him. Don’t see him the way he is now.”

  Shouldering my hoe, which must have been Papa’s when he and Shar had worked the fields together, I walked back to the hut. I knocked muck from the blade, then wiped it with my hand, before setting the tool by the door. My father stared from the shadows within. His eyes glinted as if he were an animal in a cage.

  I went to see the ox. Endurance still sat upon the ground. His back was covered with flies. I stood by his neck and hugged him. He whuffled. I could hear his gut rumbling.

  “You were my guide all those years,” I whispered in his ear.

  He was a beast, too, of course. Though somehow less an animal than Papa, now.

  I went back to the door of the hut. My sailcloth bag was there. I had no other possessions except the memories, which were sliding to dust. I squatted on my knees and looked to the darkness within. His gaze locked with mine a moment, then slipped away.

  “Papa,” I said. “Pinarjee.”

  He twitched, but did not look back at me. Flies buzzed, and the room smelled close of sweat and piss.

  “I—I love you.” I didn’t know if that was true. He had sold me, after all. How much love was that? Yet I’d been raised with clean sheets and good food and a life of the mind. What of the petty fears of Shar? I might have been a younger copy of her had I stayed here.

  Free, but tied to this land by the terror of having nothing.

  I had nothing now. Not even a name.

  “Papa. Wh-what did you and Mama call me? What was my name?”

  He sniffed once, then reached inside his dhoti to scratch at his groin.

  “What was my name?” My voice was rising despite my desire to control myself, to not frighten him. How could I come this far and not even learn this? This was the one fragment of home I could have carried away.

  “What was my name!” I screamed.

  He screamed back at me with a wordless yawp of terror, then scuttled into the farthest corner of the hut. That gave him little more distance than he already had, but he must have felt safer there. The hot smell of fresh piss flowed around me.

  I stepped back and straightened. “I am sorry,” I muttered.

  Turning, I was startled to see Shar standing right behind me with her hoe. I slipped sideways away from the swing of her strike before I realized she was not poised to attack me.

  “I never knew.” Her voice was ragged, but I could hear the regret. “He spoke only of his mother. Baida told me he’d had a wife and daughter, before.”

  “No one ever said my name?” Tears were down my face now.

  “Oh, girl, no—”

  “Don’t call me that!” I shouted before I realized she had not intended the word as I had heard it.

  “You have demons in your head,” she snapped. Her moment of honesty was fled in the face of my anger. “Now go.”

  I stood my ground as she hefted her hoe once more. “What did he do with the money?”

  “What money?”

  “He sold me for a lifetime’s worth of wages.”

  With those words, I turned away. That was as evil a curse as I knew to lay upon her. She had given me nothing, nothing. Papa even less. I cried, walking toward the road once more. Home had been my destination all my life, and it was as lost to me as the past itself. There was nothing for me now, not here or anywhere.

  My tears led the way. I followed them into the blackness of my heart, walking onward only because there was no point in stopping.

  Alternately starving and stealing, I was over a month on the road westward. I knew nothing of how to find food in a stream or a stand of trees, unless it was ripe and hanging for the touch. On that journey, I killed my second living person. He was a bandit intent on raping me. Instead, I took him with a kick to the groin, then slew him with his own knife, before falling to my knees to vomit what little was in my stomach.

  Afterwards, I lit two small fires to him and made a speaking in the manner of the Stone Coast. I had nothing good to say of the scruffy dead man except that his mother had probably loved him once, so I commemorated his shade to her. Then I took his stale flatbread and his good sandals and the knife that I had wedged into him and went on my way.

  Killing wasn’t easier the second time, even though I’d had cause that no one would dispute. The act was so final. Even now, I cannot look back with anything but sorrow. Nothing was left for forgiveness or vengeance when a person has breathed their last. Papa had been just as dead, but his body had not yet received the message.

  I moved on, with no purpose except the habit of walking. Even my bells were forgotten. Eventually, I came to travel three days with a trio of old women who did not say a word for most of that time. They wore pale robes and carried wilted lilies, in honor of the goddess whom I would soon come to serve. They shuffled slowly, but they had food and seemed to know the increasingly busy road. Best of all, they did not try to drive me away when I fell in with them. A few hours later, I flashed my knife at a young man who looked too closely at us. The oldest of the women smiled at me for that. I had no idea then that she was one of the most accomplished killers in this land.

  We crested a rise the afternoon of the third day, and there was Kalimpura. It did not look like a city to me. I was used to Copper Downs, first as a place of close walls and distant noises, then as rooftops and sewers, and finally in my last days there, a city of pale stone and slate and copper, squared lines, and narrow windows.

  Kalimpura, seen from the Landward
Road where it crosses Five Monkey Hill, is a riot of colors and curves and silvered spires topped with the sacred thunderbolts of Rav to ward off the lightning that comes with summer storms. Not that I understood as much when I first followed my feet west out of Bhopura.

  So I strode over the hill amid the thickening traffic of the previous days and saw a city that at first looked like a giant tent encampment. The Kalimpuri did not measure their buildings with rulers and plumb lines. Rather, they built in the curves of billowing silk and the lines of prayer flags straining before the monsoon wind.

  It was as if the gods of this place had dumped several hundred acres of masonry and precious metal and silk lengths to earth, but forgotten to assemble their toy.

  “Ai,” said the oldest pilgrim, a woman bent nearly double, who walked with two sticks. The first word I’d heard from any of them.

  I was struck by the whim of politeness. It seemed better than drawing my knife and killing again. “Yes, Mother?”

  She stopped moving and stamped her sticks into the road three times. A cart behind her swerved to avoid the little knot we four made. The driver began to curse, saw the look in my eyes, and suddenly found great interest in calming his team.

  “The Lily Goddess welcomes me home,” the old woman said.

  “And blessings on you, I am sure.” Blessings, I thought. A mockery. I followed no gods, not at that time. Copper Downs had provided me with none, and Selistan had proven hollow.

  “Blessings.” She peered close at me. “You’re a girl beneath that awful hair, I warrant. You need help, come ask around the temple for Mother Meiko.” She cackled, but a strange light filled her eyes. “There’s always a place for a woman of a certain bent.”

  “Thank you, Mother.” I let my stride lengthen away from hers quickly enough. Company was good, but I did not want pity. One last hot meal and an hour to work on forgetting my sins, and I would be pleased to leave this turn of the Wheel behind. A line of bearers with huge orange cloths on their heads passed me. I slipped in with them.

  People thronged toward the gates of Kalimpura. The portal that admits the Landward Road from the east is shaped like an orchid, tall and graceful and pointed with a set of doors within a larger set of doors. Traffic came in for a while, until the gate warden had seen enough of the flow; then it went out for a while. The gate was too narrow for two laden donkeys to pass one another, I later learned. What I learned that day was there was a terrible jam outside, which created a thriving business in paid line-standing, guard-bribing, and general intimidation.

  “You, boy, get away from my patch,” grumbled a fat man with no fingers on his right hand.

  “I’m not on your foolish patch,” I told him as the flank of a horse pushed me within his reach.

  His left hand, complete with fist, snatched at me. I tried to slip away, but the fat man was strangely fast. He tugged me close, his breath foul in my face. “My father, and his father, and his father, worked this patch. You are wanting to be here, you are paying me, or you are in my pay.”

  I slipped the knife from my sandal straps and slid the point between his arm and his body. “How much do you pay, then?”

  He dropped me, laughing. “That’s more like it.” Leaning close again, he added, “If you are ever pointing steel at me again, boy, you shall be shitting your own knife out your ass while learning to breathe water through the hole in your throat.”

  “So?” Reckless, crazed, caring nothing, I stood my ground.

  “So go find a few eunuchs to bully, and take their copper paisas to stand in line. Then bring it all back to me.” He grinned. “Or I’ll have you killed.”

  Thus I spent my first weeks in Kalimpura without ever passing within the walls of the city. Little Kareen, as my bully-master was known, lived on his patch. At night, one or another of the boys brought him a cotton shelter and his sleeping pillows, while more of us fetched hot wine and cold rice from the carts that never stopped circling out here.

  It was an education. I saw every kind of pilgrim, prince, and trader, as well as the endless lines of qulis carrying food, bamboo, hardwoods, and bundled or basketed goods. All of Selistan moved on the backs of little brown men, I realized. Carts were used for longer distances, or loads too bulky and heavy to be carried, but if something could be moved in a day by a man, it was.

  Women did not work so.

  Some kept their husbands’ carts, and many followed as servants of the few wives who passed. There were none who labored on their own.

  I had no real sense of how much choice the women of Copper Downs had in their lives, but I’d been raised by Petraean women. Except for Mistress Tirelle, they had come and gone freely from the Factor’s house. They gossiped of the city as if they moved about it at will. In my short time of freedom there between my escape and my flight, I had seen women in every crowd. Not under arms, surely, but carrying about the business of their lives as openly as men.

  Here women were to be owned, either playpretties much as had once been intended for me, or as servants and tools. Only the poorest women—the cart vendors’ wives, the dung-pickers in their ash gray robes and drooping veils, the elderly sweepers who walked before the wealthy to ensure their feet trod on no shit—only they seemed to move with any freedom.

  Copper Downs had been a prison for me, but Kalimpura was a prison for all women insofar as I could tell. No wonder Shar had been afraid for my papa’s land. There would have been nothing else for her except to be a servant in deepest poverty.

  The bullyboys gave me a wide berth at the first. The story of me pulling a knife on Little Kareen was hot on their lips for a few days. Some of them feared my scars, wondering what I had done to earn them from some vengeful judge or village hetman. I made sure they saw my knife, which was better steel than their cheap, brittle iron blades, and I kept my eyes sharp and mean.

  The teasing started soon enough. One boy, Ravi, bumped me as we carried food back to Little Kareen’s patch for the evening meal. I dropped a pot of warm millet, and was nearly beaten for it. I found him afterwards when he was peeing and thumped him on the back of the head with the butt of my bandit’s knife. He fell in his own puddle, from which I dragged him back to our little fire.

  “Kareen, Ravi is so drunk, he cannot hold himself,” I announced, dropping the boy and rolling him over. Everyone but Kareen laughed. He looked thoughtful, then ordered Ravi dumped in a ditch and banished for three days.

  After that, the cuts became more sly, but deeper. I was tripped twice in the dark. Ravi and two friends tried to thrash me, but I danced away from them. Later I slit the soles of their shoes, so they would have blisters on their feet.

  Little Kareen did not like this. “It is one thing for boys to tumble and rough one another,” he announced one night over a badly made stew of some pale rubbery fish. I could have done so much more with the food here, though the spices were often divine. “It is another for hatred to grow.” He looked more closely at me. “Green, step forward.”

  I did as he bade me.

  The bully-master nodded, and someone crashed into my back. Ravi, and his two friends, and then most of the other boys besides. They pummeled and kicked me, the weight of them pushing me down so I could not dance away or draw my knife. I felt my teeth loosen, my ribs ache with sickening pain, as they smacked into me.

  Even curled, crying, I knew they were not trying to kill me. Otherwise they would already have done so. On the ground amid my pain and humiliation, I swore I would never be caught beneath a mob again.

  “Enough,” Little Kareen said. “Green, you are forgiven. Are you to be forgiving your fellows?”

  I staggered to my feet. Something was wrong with my right knee, and my breath came with a jagged, burning pain in my chest. I wanted to cry out, No, by all the sleeping gods, may they burn upon the Wheel! But there was not enough fight within even me to win what would come next. “All is forgiven,” I lied, and cast my eyes down so he could not read them.

  “Then lend me your
knife,” he said. “I have need of it awhile.”

  “I . . .” I drew a painful breath. “I was told never to bare steel before you, sir.”

  “Ravi, his knife,” Little Kareen called out.

  Ravi slid my knife from my legging and carefully gave it to the big man, hilt first.

  I went to retch awhile and sleep off my pain behind a compost pile we sometimes used to hide valuables of disputed ownership.

  Everyone left me alone for two days. So thoroughly alone I got no food, and had to limp for my water, but alone.

  The third day I was back before Little Kareen. The boys were out chivvying the lines and rolling unlucky beggars. Ravi had shouted to me where I slept to see the big man before noon. So there I was, with the sun less than a finger’s width from the top of the sky, standing before him.

  Today Little Kareen sat on a throne cut from an old wine barrel. His perch was lined with brocade that had come from somewhere across the sea, for it was nothing like the textiles of Kalimpura. He let the sun beat down upon his head as he faced the moving, shoving line of traffic behind my back. His jaw was set, and his eyes drooped as he stared at me awhile. We might as well have been in a closed room, walled as we were by silence.

  “If I were a wiser man, I would probably kill you now.” His wrists flexed as if his remaining fingers wished for my neck. “As it happens, I am widely accounted a fool.”

  I knew that was very far from the truth, but I held my tongue. If nothing else, I could outrun him, even with so much tender and sore within me.

  “But . . .”He stopped, shifted. “I do not hold the Death Right. Those who push souls along the Wheel guard their privileges jealously.” Little Kareen leaned forward. “You have never been among the young, have you?”

  “No,” I admitted. I’d said not a single word of my history, but somehow he knew.

  “I can tell. You lack the way of winning trust. You do not know enough to see when others are showing you their way.” He sighed. “You are perhaps the most fearsome boy I have seen since I myself grew to full height. Quick at your work, persuasive of the foolish, rough where needed. But you do not know when to let go of it and be a boy among boys. You will not grow to be a man among men, I am afraid.”