Scar

by Alice Broadway

  “Of course it had blood on it,” Longsight retorts. “She embedded the blade into my body. It was not a trick. It was a real dagger, real blood, a real death. My heart stopped. Within minutes, the people knew the truth – their leader was dead. They even laid my body in state, allowing people, over the course of two days, to pay their respects. I was anointed with embalming oil, wrapped in blue cloth – ready for the flayer’s blade.”

  I stare at him and grit my teeth. “But people don’t just come back from the dead,” I say.

  “You’re right. People don’t.” And with that, Mayor Longsight turns and walks on. I glance at Jack and I think I catch him frowning – looking at Longsight, not as though he was Saint reborn or a miracle maker, but as though he were a fool. The look passes before I can process it and I am shoved forward, following Longsight once again.

  Chapter Four

  We walk on, down steps until we are below ground level. It smells different, as though the air is old. We must be quite deep underground by the time we reach a set of double wooden doors that suggest the start of a new wing – a part of the government building I have never seen before.

  Mel, Saintstone’s storyteller, has been waiting for us. She nods respectfully to the mayor. Our eyes meet for a second and I feel it all over again – the electric pulse that comes from her, the way she fills a space just by existing. Her red curls are pinned up off her face, and her intricately inked skin reminds me of being read to as a child. Although she intimidates me, she is also the taste of home and with that comes a strange comfort.

  “Your new charge,” Minnow says to Mel, gesturing to me with a flourish.

  “She has not received ink?” Mel asks, her gaze sweeping over me – eyes lingering on my left arm. “Why not? She is a criminal and should be marked as such.” I notice Longsight’s mouth tighten at being questioned but his voice is light when he replies.

  “You fear I will not ensure justice is done? Believe me, storyteller, her punishment will come. For now, though, she is in your charge.”

  Mel’s mouth opens but then she nods assent.

  Longsight clasps her arm. “I’m counting on you, Mel. I value your faithfulness.”

  Mayor Longsight and Minnow turn and walk back through the wooden doors. Mel looks after them for a moment. “You have at least been saved a trip to the jail.” She turns and looks at me, her eyes unreadable. “Punishment marks are done within earshot of the cells – it’s not a nice sound.”

  “Is that where Obel is?” I glance towards the dark corridor that must head to the prison.

  “If he’s still alive, then yes,” Mel says, and turns. I can only try to keep up with her brisk pace as she walks further into this underground warren of dark, dank corridors and forbidding closed doors.

  Eventually we reach a passageway that is familiar, and I realize we’ve gone all the way under the town square and have ended up at Mel’s study, which is in the basement of the museum. I hadn’t realized there was underground access to these places and inwardly curse myself for not paying more attention to the turns we took – maybe I would have been able to find a way out.

  I look around her study, at the shelves of books and the worn woven rug. Her desk is messy with papers. This is where I came to be told my results – where I learned that I had been accepted as a trainee at Obel’s studio. I visited Mel here when I needed her help and advice, back when I thought she was my mentor and that she cared about me. The last time I was here Mel had a charge – a child called Isolda. I wonder where she is now.

  Mel shows me around – points out a door to a small bathroom and another that leads into a tiny bedroom where she sleeps.

  “You will sleep here.” She points to a mattress and some cushions in the corner. “You’ll be comfortable enough.”

  There are no windows to hint at the time of day and so I try to gauge the hour while I arrange the cushions into somewhere I can sit. Time with Longsight always disorientates me – talking with him could have taken hours or just minutes. I am tired from trudging through the forest with Gull, and it was dawn when we arrived in the town. Oh, Gull. I close my eyes and think of her, alone – perhaps in the jail. Perhaps in the hospital, a cruel voice whispers. Or she may be dead. No. Longsight promised that she would be safe for now. I cling to that thought.

  The sound of paper on paper and Mel’s sighs and the scratch of a pencil making notes lulls me to sleep.

  I dream that it is night, and I hear someone call my name. I run, following the sound, but with each step I am no closer to the voice that is crying out for me to save them. Hands claw at my back and I try harder to run, but I can’t evade them, can’t wriggle free of their grasp. They are on me, and I turn to see my pursuers. Their skin is grey and peeling away to reveal tiny chinks of light – as though they are broken ceramic lanterns, hiding flames inside. Their fingers grasp and scratch at me like dead branches. I don’t know whether to fight or give in; whether to peel away more of their skin to reveal the light or to snuff out their sparks. Where they touch me, my skin recedes into grey too. But I fear there will be no light within me.

  My own cry wakes me. “You’re a noisy sleeper,” Mel says. She pulls a book closer to her on her desk.

  I go to the small bathroom and wash my face. While I’m there I lift my top and check my skin. Ever since I was bitten by Fenn’s dog back in Featherstone, I’ve had lingering marks which seem to keep travelling lower. Sure enough, the lines snake across my stomach now, a troubling image determined to appear. I try rubbing them away with a flannel and water, but I know it’s useless – I know that like the crow on my chest they’ll reveal themselves soon enough. These kinds of marks always do.

  The study has a comforting smell. Mel’s oiled skin gives up its scent of rose, tea and lavender; the books on the shelves and her desk almost breathe with how often they are opened and are allowed to lie with their faces up to the sky. I sit straighter and watch Mel work.

  She is frowning over a skin book, her red curls messy and escaping from their pins. Not the normal kind of skin book, but the skin book of a storyteller. Storytellers have no stories of their own recorded – their books are made up of our community’s sacred stories.

  Mel must have taken this book from the secret shelves she once showed me. Up a set of steps at the back of the museum is a room you would not notice if you didn’t know to look. Had she really trusted me back when she took me into that intimate, holy place? It feels like another world. The storytellers are not named and remembered by their families for their deeds and accomplishments like the rest of us. They have no names along their spines, no family trees or faces – only the imprint of the stories they recorded and recounted. Storytellers of the past huddle together skin to skin on the shelves in that hidden room. They are unknown by most of the community, but for Mel, they are family and history and home.

  We sit there for a time in silence, while she turns the pages and I doze. “Where are you?” she mutters to herself, and I watch as she draws the skin book closer and slowly leafs through its pages again, studying each one with a magnifying glass and a frown. “You must be here somewhere.”

  I stretch and stand, and Mel looks up.

  “Can I help?” I ask. I force a smile. “May as well make myself useful.”

  Mel raises an eyebrow. “There is an art to this, you know.” Then she seems to unbend slightly.

  “Which story is it?”

  “Pull up a chair.” She moves hers slightly so there is space for two at her desk and I find a wooden seat – small and low, made for a child – and drag it over so I am sitting next to Mel looking with her at a storyteller’s skin book. I am surprised to see that the story she has been puzzling over is the tale of the Sleeping Princess – a story so familiar that we could probably all recite it before we started school.

  “The marks are so different to yours,” I exclaim. “Aren’t you meant to keep the stories unchanged?” I look at Mel’s skin – full of colour. The sleeping princ
ess is on her arm – a tangle of green thorns that reaches up to reveal a girl standing tall over a broken spindle. I see the story of the lovers on her calf; they stand, sun and moon converging. The mark that shows Saint is partly hidden by her skirt, but I see him golden and glorious. Her marks are like ripe fruit, and yet the book on the table before us is black and grey – beautiful, yes – but it’s only when I really look closely at the skin book that I see any similarity between this illustration of the story and the work on Mel’s own skin. Mel gives a wry smile.

  “These are the kinds of questions I love and yet rarely get to answer. Yes, the marks have changed over the years.” She passes a hand tenderly over the page in front of her. “If all the storytellers from every generation met together and recited one of our stories, our voices would be as one. The words would be almost identical – we have a strong and faithful history of passing on and speaking the stories perfectly. But when it comes to our marks, we are free to choose – so long as we reflect the stories accurately.”

  “Why would you be given that freedom?” I ask. “It doesn’t sound like the kind of Saintstone I know.”

  Mel shakes her head in amusement. “You’ve become cynical.” She sits back, and the tips of her fingers play along the lines of ink on her arm. “A storyteller’s job has never been just to get the words right.” I raise an eyebrow, but Mel doesn’t let me interrupt. “My role is not to simply tell the stories, but to enable the people to truly hear them. I look at the world we find ourselves in and I trust that stories can help us make sense of it – my task is to help our community see how they fit into the stories. The ink on my skin is an interpretation of the stories – a way of telling them for us here now. Isn’t that what all our creative pursuits do? Our attempts at art tell the same tales in new ways so that we can make sense of the world around us and the spirit within us.”

  I lean forward. I feel like I am having lessons again. “What if a storyteller gets it wrong? What if their interpretation is false or they are trying to twist the stories to get what they want?”

  “This is why we always go back to the beginning. Our skin books stand as a testimony to the generation we served, but every new storyteller starts in the same way – the same words, the same stories, the same fearsome and holy task.” She shrugs. “We just bring something different to it.”

  “What do you think you have brought to the stories?” I am so curious to know.

  She thinks for a while. “When I first began as storyteller I thought I was living in a golden age. There was so much passion and faith and a renewed love for obedience to the teachings of our ancestors.”

  “You don’t feel that way now?” I push for Mel to say more.

  She sighs. “Now … now, I see our people more afraid than ever before – and yet at the same time, more sure of their own righteousness. Perhaps it was always this way. Perhaps I was naïve, or too full of hope to see the cracks.”

  I stare down at the book in front of her. “Why now?” I ask. “Why are you looking at these old books now?”

  Mel stares down too.

  “I keep wondering if I’ve missed something. Something crucial.” A furrow appears between her eyebrows. “Throughout our history, when something new or unusual happened, the storytellers have been able to look back at the skin books and see that it was predicted or that it was hidden in the stories all along. All of the major events in our history – the blank resettlement, for instance – have been predicted in some way. Just not…” She taps the table absently. “Just not this.”

  My heart thumps. “And by this, you mean Mayor Longsight’s reincarnation?” I ask softly.

  She looks perplexed, and my heart goes out to her, briefly. Mel has always believed so strongly in her faith. “There must be a precedent for this – his death and resurrection. It must be here somewhere, in these teachings.”

  “But you can’t find it.” It’s a relief to hear someone else say it too, to have them voice their bewilderment about the mayor’s apparent miracle.

  Her troubled eyes meet mine. “Not one story talks about a leader who could defy death in this way.”

  “But the story of the lovers?” I ask. “His queen calls him back from the dead with her love.”

  Mel smiles a tiny smile. “You always were a good student, Leora,” she concedes. “But no, his was a different resurrection – one that changed him. Remember that although the king was the sun, the story ends with him ruling the underworld – the land of the dead – and their son was the living ruler in his parents’ place.” She turns a page. “There is no precedent for what our mayor claims.” She shakes her head. “Our people will look to me to explain. They need me now, more than ever.” She lifts her eyes to mine once more, and where once I saw certainty, now I see only fear. “My training should have prepared me, but my hands are empty.”

  Chapter Five

  There are some things that once shattered can never be put back together again.

  Given an egg, do you break it and make something new with the golden innards, or do you simply admire its smooth and perfect shell?

  I think about the crack that is appearing now, before my eyes, in Mel’s faith. Do I tell her that there are more stories than the ones she knows? Will it make something new? Or would it be better, kinder and more beautiful to let her keep her shell of reality smooth and perfect?

  I think of the mark on my foot – the egg with the cracks that let the light in. Breathing deeply, I begin.

  “You remember you told the lovers’ story at my father’s weighing of the soul ceremony?” I venture. Mel nods. “Well – Featherstone have a different version.” Mel’s eyebrows dip. “It has some of the same things: lovers, a box, a death – of sorts.”

  “They tell stories?” Mel asks in disbelief.

  “Do you think they are savages? Yes, they tell the same stories you do – but each is like a mirror image. The same, but not.” Mel frowns and shakes her head. “If you will allow me,” I say persuasively, “I think a different story may help you here.”

  She nods, slowly, and I begin.

  Here’s one you might not have heard, Sana had said – as though there was something illicit in the sharing. And I feel that rush of rebellion now, as I let my lips form the words.

  “The story begins like ours. A king and a queen rule over the people but the king is despised by his brother. But in this story, the king and queen lead with cruelty: leaders who care more for power than their people.

  “The king, called Metheus, loves the authority he wields over the people and he hungers for more. And so, under the council of his cunning wife, Metheus holds a banquet where he claims that he is undefeatable. He climbs into a casket, which is flung into the river. The king and queen elaborately fake Metheus’ death and when he appears again to the people three days later they are astonished. Their king’s boasts were true: he is indeed favoured by the ancestors. He is their immortal leader, and even though he leaves them hungry and works them hard, he must have pleased the ancestors. The people’s devotion to their king only grows.

  “But one man doubts. The king’s brother hears the queen describing how they tricked the people: the king is no more immortal than him. The brother learns another crucial fact: the king is convinced by his own trickery; he believes he has been resurrected and favoured by the ancestors. He is certain that he will not die.

  “And so, Metheus’ brother plays a trick. He only means to make a fool of his boastful brother, by holding another banquet and allowing the people to see their king get drunk and make a spectacle of himself. He has not accounted for Metheus’ madness.

  “The story ends with Metheus slicing at his skin, offering himself up as everlasting food to his people. And the people see that their king Metheus was just a man who believed his own lie and, eventually, came to a sticky, bloody end.”

  “That’s disgusting.” Mel’s lip curls in revulsion.

  “I think it’s meant to be a sort of joke,” I say gently,
and Mel raises her eyebrows disapprovingly. “I think Metheus is meant to be like us – like the marked. When he takes the knife to his own skin, I think the listener is meant to think of skin books and eternal life.” As someone who spends so long studying stories, I would have thought she would have seen it right away.

  “The blanks think we’re fools, then,” Mel says bitterly.

  “But you see the similarity? A king who dies and comes back to life. Mayor Longsight is just like Metheus.”

  Mel stares at me. “But … in that story, it was just a trick. He was never immortal. A cheap trick that the king convinced himself was true.”

  I say nothing, but I don’t take my eyes from her thoughtful, frowning gaze.

  Chapter Six

  Mel goes to bed early, a notebook and pen in her hand. “My study door doesn’t lock, Leora – and I have no desire to stand watch over you all night. If you attempt to escape you will be found and you will not be the only one to be punished. Understood?” I nod. I won’t try to escape. Now that he has Gull, Longsight has me where he wants me.

  Lying on the lumpy cushions, a thin blanket over me, I try not to think about the unlocked door. I try not to think of Gull. I only meant to leave her for a moment.

  I try not to think of Mum, and whether what Longsight said was true. She would never turn on me, never. But, lying here in the dark, I imagine her sick and alone and I can see why she despises me. I want to be little again – a young girl who is hemmed in by her mother’s love. I am lonely and cold, and no one cares that I am here.

  Mel is snoring – not loudly, but once my mind has fixed on it there is no way I can drift off. I tell myself I will just take a walk up and down the corridor – stretch my legs and perhaps tire myself out enough to bring sleep. I’m a guest, not a prisoner, I repeat under my breath.

  The study door eases open quietly, and outside I feel like I can breathe easier. I walk a little down the corridor – and that’s when I see it: light pooling from beneath the door that leads to the museum…