Freedom's Gate

by Naomi Kritzer

  Saken laughed. “There’s no shame in being sore! We’re all soft after the winter, and you’re not the only ones here with a jar of salve. I had Maydan make me up one last night, too.”

  But we were the only ones who had had to drop our trousers to let Maydan inspect us. Saken probably guessed what I was thinking because she laughed again and poked my arm playfully. “Next time just admit when you’re sore. She only pulls rank if she thinks she can’t trust you to be sensible instead of stoic. Don’t act so Greek, refusing bandages when you’re bleeding from every limb.”

  I laughed a little at that, and Saken gave me a pat on the shoulder and went to get her own horse.

  The steppe we were on got a bit more moisture than the hills around Elpisia—the spring rains were heavier and lasted longer. The low hills flattened out as we rode today, and became almost a plain, covered in rippling grasses high enough to brush the soles of my boots as I rode. The green grasses were everywhere, but we also rode through patches of scarlet poppies, vivid yellow and purple flowers that spilled from vines that climbed anything they could find, and something that smelled vividly of honey. We reached the Ash River in early afternoon—it cut through the green fields like a narrow silver chain. Spindly trees stood in knee-high water; the spring rains, I thought, had swollen the stream a bit.

  I urged my horse a little to fall in step beside Saken. “What’s it like in high summer?” I asked.

  “An ice-cold trickle. It’s spring-fed and sticks around all year.”

  I nodded, thinking in relief that at least I wouldn’t be hauling buckets up from the bottom of the well. No doubt there would be some other just-as-unpleasant task. Someone this morning had gathered up all the animal dung and put it in sacks to bring along and dry out; perhaps that would be my next job. I sighed and tried to cheer myself up with the thought that my real job was working for Kyros. But that made me feel guilty that I’d done little real observation. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to observe the sisterhood, but my legs hurt so badly that mostly I just focused on staying on my horse.

  We followed the stream for several days, finally reaching our camp early one afternoon. It was by a bend in the stream, and like the well, was marked with a cairn. The cairn seemed a bit redundant to me, as three good-sized tamarisk trees grew right by it. We dismounted and led our horses to the stream for a drink; the camels and other livestock had a drink as well, then set to work grazing. One of the camels tried to nibble at the leaves of the tree and was firmly warned off by Erdene.

  “Let’s show you how to unpack your horses,” Saken said.

  “Lauria used to work in a stable,” Tamar said.

  Saken glanced at me with a flash of interest, then shrugged. “Lauria, why don’t you show Tamar what to do, then?”

  A knot of panic twisted in my stomach. To perform as a stable hand, with an observer? I wished that Tamar had kept her mouth shut. “I worked in a Greek stable, not an Alashi one,” I said. “I don’t know if we did things the same way you do them here . . .”

  “I’ll let you know if you do something wrong,” Saken said, and stepped back to watch. Under her supervision, I helped Tamar to unload, unsaddle, and rub down the packhorses and remounts. Ordinarily I would have found the task pleasant, even soothing—certainly preferable to hauling water. But now my stomach churned and I had to breathe deeply and remind myself that I had groomed my own horse thousands of times since going to work for Kyros, and the stable hands groomed the horses the same way. Of course, I was unfamiliar with the Alashi saddle and other equipment, and Saken stepped in to help us. Other than that, she seemed to see nothing wrong with my approach. Tamar, though, seemed to sense my nervousness; she glanced at me a few times, a worried look on her face, as if she knew she’d done something wrong by pointing out that I’d worked with horses before.

  “Do we have to move again tomorrow?” Tamar asked Saken.

  “Oh no. We’ll be here for a couple of weeks. When the animals have all the grass that’s easy to walk to, then we’ll move on down the river a bit.”

  Tamar nodded and turned back to the horse she was grooming with evident relief.

  “Hey!” The vicious tone had to be Ruan, and sure enough, it was Ruan who ripped the curry comb out of Tamar’s hands. “That is my horse.”

  “It’s a remount,” Saken said defensively.

  “I rode her today, she’s mine to groom.”

  “You have your task, she has hers,” Saken said. “I told her to groom this horse, Ruan sweetie, so if you’ve got a complaint, take it up with me.”

  Ruan elbowed Tamar aside and gave Saken a glare. “I take care of my own mounts, Saken. I don’t need some blossom to do it.”

  Saken rolled her eyes. “Yeah, Ruan, fine. And when they make dinner, you can make your own soup that night, too, so you don’t have to eat something that came from a blossom’s hands. But what will you do when they’re learning to set up the yurt? Sleep outside until we move?”

  “I. Want to. Groom. My own horse. Is that so hard to understand?” Ruan threw the curry comb to the ground, slipped a sweet to the horse, and stomped off; the horse trailed after her, happy enough to spend more time with her. Better the horse than us.

  Saken shrugged. “Well, the next horse was ridden by Gulim for part of the day. She’ll just be glad you’re learning horse care today and not cooking, since horse care really is supposed to be one of the first tasks a recruit learns. I think she was annoyed yesterday that you were put to work drawing water.”

  “I’d have been glad to let Gulim do it,” I said.

  “Oh, of course. Janiya stuck you with it because we reached the well so late, there really wasn’t time to let you learn a new task. And you had to do something. Drawing the water didn’t require a lesson.”

  “It was fine,” Tamar said, raising her chin. “I was just glad we could do something useful.”

  As I’d expected, the kumiss came out again after dinner, and while I could have refused it, I knew that to fit in I needed to drink with everyone else. From the look on Tamar’s face as she held out her cup for Erdene to fill, she’d had the same realization. I took a deep breath, then a gulp of the kumiss. I told myself that it wasn’t quite as horrible when you knew what to expect. “Yogurt,” Tamar muttered. “Think of it as really thin yogurt.”

  I had never much liked yogurt, either. I swirled the cup, stared in it with distaste, then took another gulp. “It’s like thick vinegar.”

  “I’d rather think of it as thin yogurt,” Tamar said, and forced down a sip. “Did you ever get to drink wine, at Kyros’s?”

  I wondered what the hell the right answer was to that question. “On festival days,” I improvised. “We each got a little. Also, there was an older slave who would get drunk sometimes. I have no idea where he got the wine, though.”

  “When we went downstairs at Sophos’s, the men would often offer us wine.” She sighed and leaned back on her elbow, staring into the kumiss. “I suppose you never did the lineup, did you? You were gone too fast for that.”

  “What lineup?”

  “You know, when all the concubines went downstairs after dinner.”

  Someone—Jolay; I dredged up her name after a moment—had brought out a dombra, Erdene had a flute, and Maydan and a woman whose name I hadn’t learned yet had drums. Maydan sat cross-legged on the far side of the fire and began to tap her drum: dum duppa duppa dum dum. Dum duppa duppa dum dum. The other woman slapped her drum with a ringing crash and Erdene and Jolay joined in. Other women began to get up to dance. Saken went first, circling her hips and then swirling herself into a spin, while the other women hung back for a moment to watch. Tamar watched with them, a little bleakly. “When Sophos had guests, after dinner, we’d all go downstairs, and usually first we’d dance. We danced together; you saw us practicing. How long we’d dance—well, Boradai would make the call, depending on how much the men seemed to be enjoying the spectacle, how drunk they were, how late it was, and so on. Whe
n we were done, if Sophos had a particularly honored guest that night, we’d line up so he could choose the one he wanted. Once that guest had chosen, the other men there—Sophos, other guests—would stand up and choose a girl for the night, or a boy. They didn’t always take you back to their room. Sometimes they’d have you sit with them at dinner and drink some wine. So every now and then I’d have wine. I didn’t much like it.”

  I remembered the cloying taste of the drugged wine Tamar had given me that one night, and shuddered. I wanted to rinse my mouth suddenly, but had no water handy, and I knew that the taste of kumiss would truly make me gag. I set my cup down.

  “Girls are always given a little wine before their first time. It’s supposed to make it a little easier for them. The drugs, too.”

  I really didn’t want to think about this, but I didn’t want to get up and dance, either. “Talk to me about something else, Tamar,” I said. “Please?”

  She was silent for a little while, then said, “I miss Jaran.”

  “The shaman,” I said. “Right?”

  “Yes. He was apprenticing me. I had learned most of the rituals; there were a few left, but he thought that on the night of the summer solstice, we could invite one of the djinn through the Bright Gates to visit me.”

  “Maybe there’s a shaman here . . .”

  “They all worship Prometheus.”

  “There must be a shaman. Who would banish rogue djinni? Even the worshippers of Athena have to go to a shaman for that.”

  “I wonder if the women in the Sisterhood of Weavers ever get possessed by djinn? Do you suppose they just spit it out into one of their necklaces and bind it up on the spot?”

  I shrugged, for once not dissembling. I had no idea. The Sisterhood didn’t exactly chat with messengers about the technical details of summoning and binding aerika.

  Saken sat down beside us, breathless, and refilled our cups with kumiss. “Are you having fun? You’re not dancing!”

  “I don’t much like dancing,” Tamar said.

  “And I’m terrible at it. I’d rather watch you,” I said.

  “Oh . . . well. Just so long as you aren’t homesick and miserable.”

  “Never!” Tamar said.

  Saken poured herself some kumiss, too, and gulped half of it down on the spot. “Well, I’m going to go dance some more—catch you later!” She got back up, now a little unsteady on her feet, and stumbled back into the circle. Ruan was dancing now, I saw, to raucous approval. She was an excellent dancer. Far better than me, or even Tamar. I felt a twinge of disappointment at seeing her skill. I forced down a little more of the kumiss.

  The evening wore on. It was clearly the big first-night-back-with-the-sisters party, now that we’d reached the grazing grounds, and I knew I couldn’t go to bed. Though privately I had to admit that Saken’s question had struck home. I was homesick, and I was miserable. Not that I wanted to be back with Sophos; the thought made me shudder and reach, despite the taste, for another gulp of the kumiss. No, I wanted to be back with Kyros. Doing tasks I knew I could accomplish; riding Zhade, not Kara. Sleeping in my bed in my own quiet room. Eating Greek food, wearing Greek clothes, worshipping a Greek goddess who hadn’t run away from Olympus to become goddess of a bunch of troublesome nomads. Not having to constantly watch my tongue lest I say aerika instead of djinni. I missed the privacy. I missed the respect. Accomplish your task, then; the sooner you’re done, the sooner you’ll be back there. And the sooner you’ll be able to have Sophos staked out in the desert for the vultures as well. What was my task? Well, to earn those damn beads, I supposed. I touched the single cerulean bead that rested under my collar, and thought, Staying here, miserable at the party, is my task right now. I might as well make the best of it. But I still didn’t get up to dance.

  Very late, I found myself sitting, half in a stupor, with an even more drunk Tamar, Erdene, and Gulim—Gulim, the one who wanted us to do tasks in the right order, who also, as it turned out, was the one who played the drums along with Maydan. Gulim flopped down on her back and pressed her hands to her head. “I think I had too much kumiss.”

  “I know you had too much kumiss,” Erdene said, and giggled uncontrollably.

  “You’re the recruit,” Gulim said, blinking at me. “And you’re the other recruit.” She didn’t quite manage to focus on Tamar. “I should probably ask you if you have any questions. About—this.” She waved her hand and closed her eyes again.

  I had a hundred questions, of course. Were there shamans here, and if not, how did they get rid of rogue djinni? How many of these women were lovers? How many beads did I need to earn? What the hell were the tests and was Gulim drunk enough to be persuaded to explain to me what I had to do to pass them? I was drunk enough to think it was a good idea to ask them, but by the time I had decided that the test question was by far the most important and I should go ahead and ask that one first, Gulim had either fallen asleep or passed out.

  I woke with the sun in my eyes and a raging headache. Someone had thrown a blanket over me where I’d dropped; Gulim still lay beside me, snoring. Tamar was rubbing her eyes, one hand pressed to the side of her head. Janiya stared down at both of us, her eyes bloodshot but looking wide-awake. “It’s time for your first test,” she said. “Get up and get ready. You’re going to go out, on foot, and bring back a piece of karenite.”

  We stumbled out from under our blankets. “Move!” Janiya said.

  “I don’t even know what karenite looks like,” Tamar said.

  Janiya held out a stone, turning it back and forth in her hand so that it caught the light. It was plain gray until you saw it at the right angle; then it abruptly flashed blue, green, and red. I blinked at it, trying to remember where I’d seen it before. “That’s karenite. It’s found on the ground, out on the steppe—you don’t have to dig for it.” She pointed out toward the open plain. “It’s important to the Alashi; we trade it for things we can’t make for ourselves. Any other questions?”

  My head hurt, my mouth tasted foul, and I was ashamed of my utter confusion and befuddlement. “Can we keep that with us so that we know what we’re looking for?”

  Janiya flipped me the stone. She waited, staring at us impatiently, until Tamar and I both turned and headed out of the camp, heading in the direction that Janiya had pointed.

  It was weirdly discouraging, to be back out, wandering around on foot. At least Tamar was wearing boots that fit her now—but we had no water. I hoped it wouldn’t take long to find a piece of karenite. We walked along, our eyes on the ground, as the sun rose in the sky. Waving gold-green grasses were waist-high, making it hard to spot much of anything. I could hear a bird singing somewhere nearby, and farther off, another bird answering. A breeze lifted the corner of my head scarf, briefly; the grass rustled around me like water rippling around a dipped cup. A drop of sweat trickled down into my eyes; I blotted at it with the corner of my scarf.

  “There’s a rockfall,” Tamar said, pointing. “Maybe we’ll find a piece in there somewhere.”

  Part of an eroded low hill had broken away, rocks and dirt and long-dried bits of wood sliding into a heap. It seemed like a better bet than just striding along through the steppe, particularly since the sun was growing higher and we had no water. Tamar and I sat down and began to sort through the rocks.

  “I wish we had some water,” Tamar said. I nodded silently. “And karenite. Why wouldn’t Janiya give us more of a clue of how to find it?”

  “Maybe the point of the test is to see if we can reason out how best to look for it.”

  “Well, then, I hope we find some in here. This was certainly the most reasonable spot we’ve found to look.”

  An hour passed. We found plain gray stones, chunks of crumbling sandstone, even a stone that held the outline of a snail’s shell, which I set aside as an interesting curiosity to bring back to the camp, even if it wasn’t what we were looking for. But no karenite. I swallowed, thinking longingly of my waterskin. Just one sip, I thought.
One swallow. If only we could find karenite and go back to the camp . . .

  “Hey!” Tamar pulled out a chunk of something that glittered a little in the sun. “I think I might have found some!”

  I compared it to my stone. “Yes, that’s it. Let’s get the hell back to camp.”

  It was past noon when we arrived, hungry and thirsty. Janiya stood near the border, waiting for us. Tamar offered her the piece we’d found; Janiya made no move to take it. Her face was dark, her voice brimming with audible disgust. “You walked right out of the camp. You didn’t bring food. You didn’t bring water and you didn’t just follow the stream. You didn’t bring a weapon to defend yourself. You walked out there with the clothes on your back and the boots on your feet, and nothing else.”

  “That’s what you—” I said.

  “No. I sent you on an errand. I never told you not to bring water.”

  “But you—” Tamar started.

  “But I didn’t tell you to bring it, either. And you’re so helpless, so dependent, that you need orders to bring water with you into the desert?” We both fell silent. Tamar was flushing angrily and biting her lip. Janiya went on: “You are acting like slaves. A slave doesn’t have to think; a slave just has to obey. A slave doesn’t have to protect herself; a slave can rely on her master for protection. A slave doesn’t have to ask questions, see to supplies, take initiative. Questions are to be feared, supplies are provided by someone else, and initiative is dangerous.”

  “But we found the karenite you sent us for,” Tamar said.

  “This was not a test to see whether you could find karenite,” Janiya said. “It was a test of whether you could act like free women. Whether you could use the common sense that you must have in you somewhere if you reached the Alashi alive—to fetch yourself water, or at least ask for water, or at least ask for advice on whether you should take anything with you rather than stumbling blindly out onto the steppe. That was the test. And you failed.”