Freedom's Gate

by Naomi Kritzer

  “Was that to teach me to look carefully before I reach into the quiver?” I said. “I’ve heard that the Alashi poison their arrow tips. Do they also bring along whole snakes to fling at their enemies?”

  “Oh, that was just for my own amusement, blossom,” she said, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes when she could finally get breath. “To think that you’d get so upset over a little grass snake!”

  “Oh yes, when it coiled around my wrist, I’m sure I should simply have known that it was a grass snake and not venomous,” I shouted. “After all, you knew, so why wouldn’t I?”

  Ruan just said, “Eek! A snake!” in a high-pitched voice that was apparently supposed to be a mockery of me. I turned away, shaking with anger. Snakes didn’t really frighten me—not really—but they weren’t exactly something I liked to cuddle. I grabbed another arrow and shot at the target. The arrow went even wider than before.

  “Eek! Eek, I say!” Ruan said again, throwing up her hands in mimicry of ladylike panic. Tamar was watching her, her lips tight. She plucked out an arrow, tucked it into her hand, drew it back, and released—and a moment later, Ruan’s exclamations died as we heard the thwock of the arrow hitting the target. Tamar drew out another arrow: thwock. Thwock. Thwock.

  I watched, openmouthed.

  “Have you done this before, blossom?” Ruan asked.

  Tamar gave her a contemptuous look and didn’t answer. After a moment, Ruan shrugged. “Beginner’s luck,” she said.

  I finished firing my arrows, and Ruan sent us both to gather them up again.

  We unrolled the felt that evening, but apparently it still wasn’t completely done: the women heated up more pots of boiling water to soak the wool and hair, then rolled it back up, even more tightly. Once it was secured, Jolay stepped forward with some strips of black cloth. Murmuring something in a low voice, she tied the strips together, then tied the knotted strand around the wrapped felt. Then she turned toward the sisterhood. “Glory to Prometheus, Brother of Freedom! Glory to Arachne, Sister of Freedom!”

  “Glory to Arachne and Prometheus,” most of the women responded. I glanced at Tamar; she was mumbling along with everyone else, reluctantly.

  “Sister Arachne, breaker of chains, bless and shelter our sisterhood. Brother Prometheus, bringer of fire, bless and shelter our sisterhood.”

  “Prometheus and Arachne, bless and protect us!” Around us, the women clasped hands, enthusiastically. Out came a small sack, which Jolay shook out to empty. There was a cascade of little scraps of black cloth; the other women scrambled forward, snatching up scraps. Then they scattered around, laughing, tying strips around the wrists of their closest friends. Saken had grabbed a good-sized handful of strips, and had tied one around Erdene’s wrist. Now she came over to tie strips around my wrist and Tamar’s wrist as well.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Scraps from last year’s sister-cloth. It’s good luck to get a strip from a friend.”

  A little reluctant to brave the melee, I went up and scrounged a scrap to offer to Tamar. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ruan approach Saken, and exchange strips of cloth with her. I tied the scrap I’d found around Tamar’s skinny wrist, but the piece she’d found was too short go to go around mine. Mimicking the other sisters we saw with this dilemma, we tucked it into my belt. The last of the scraps blew away in the night wind.

  While everyone had been busy exchanging strips of black cloth, Zhanna had stepped forward. She carried a drum, a bowl of water, and a bundle of feathers. “We bless our cloth with river water. As they flowed once, they will flow again.” She poured the water in the bowl over the straw mats, then beat the drum, chanting a low, monotonous song. Though I’d heard most of the Alashi worshipped Prometheus and Arachne, they maintained a respectful silence. After a time, I could see the sparkle in the air that I recognized as a djinn; it passed briefly into Zhanna, and she stopped chanting, hugging herself tightly and sweeping her eyes over the assembly. I was afraid that the djinn would speak to me, as the Fair One had, but this one seemed much less social. Zhanna’s hands went up in blessing, and with another sparkle, the djinn was gone.

  The kumiss came out again; I accepted the smallest cup I thought I could get away with. “I thought all the Alashi worshipped Prometheus and Arachne,” I said to Saken when she poured my kumiss.

  “Well, most of us do. But of course there have to be shamans to keep the djinni from making trouble . . .”

  “Zhanna is a shaman?”

  “Oh yes. There are just a few of the sisters who primarily worship the djinni—Zhanna is one, there are a couple of others. I suppose both of you are djinn-worshippers.” She glanced at Tamar, who stared down at her kumiss. I wondered if she was ashamed of her slave religion, or if she was simply bracing herself to down the kumiss.

  “I was raised worshipping Arachne,” I said, since I’d told that story to Tamar. “I was told that the djinni weren’t gods, but slaves like us.”

  Saken glanced again at Tamar and bit her lip. “Well, some of them are certainly slaves, but others are out there, and sometimes they make trouble . . .” Saken shrugged and stood up to go get more kumiss. I accidentally put my hand in my cup and decided I didn’t need to refill.

  “That answers your question, doesn’t it?” I said to Tamar. “There are shamans here. There are some who worship the djinni. As long as you want to keep worshipping them.”

  “I wonder if it will mark me,” Tamar said, raising her eyes to mine. “You know. As a—blossom.”

  “Zhanna’s not a ‘blossom,’ ” I said. “If she was ever a slave, I haven’t heard anyone talk about it.” Thinking it over, I thought that Saken and Erdene had never been slaves; I was quite sure Ruan had been, once, and Maydan. I wasn’t sure about Jolay and Zhanna, and I couldn’t have said why I was so certain of Ruan and Maydan. Ruan’s cruelty, and her clear lack of a close friend, made me think that she hadn’t been born here. Maydan, though, it was just a hunch. I shook my head; Lauria the escaped slave would not know this. “Follow your heart, Tamar. I don’t think anyone honestly cares. Except for maybe Ruan, and who cares what the hell she thinks?”

  Tamar smiled at that and glanced at my cup. “Oh dear,” she said in a slightly mocking tone. “You’ve spilled your kumiss, haven’t you? I’d better go get you some more . . .”

  “Don’t you dare,” I said.

  She gulped hers down and shuddered. “Ah. Well. Having done my duty, I’d better sneak off to bed before someone refills my cup.”

  A shadow fell over us, and we looked up to see Janiya.

  “Do you two know how to cook?” she asked. Without waiting for us to answer, she said, “It doesn’t really matter. Saken will explain the basics to you. You two will cook dinner for the sisterhood tomorrow evening. You’ll need to start at around noon, I expect, since you haven’t done it before. Good night.”

  This chest holds sacks of rice.” We stood in the supply tent; Saken pointed to a big wooden chest with a hinged lid. “This chest holds sacks of lentils.” She opened the lid briefly so that we could peer in and look. “Spices are in here.” Another chest, this one smaller, and when she opened it, we saw smaller sacks of tightly woven linen. “Flour’s in here.” Another big wood box. “Game has been scarce, so probably no meat tonight. Here.” She set a big iron pot at our feet. When I looked in, I could see lines etched inside from years of use. “Rice up to this line, then water to here. Bring it to a boil and cover it with the lid. It’ll be done when all the water’s absorbed. That doesn’t take long, but it takes a long time to come to a boil, so leave plenty of time.” She set out another pot. “This one’s for the lentils: lentils to this line, water to here, two handfuls of spices, and start it cooking when you start the rice.”

  “This doesn’t sound like it’ll take all that long,” I said. “Why did Janiya tell us to start at noon?”

  “She’d also like you to make bread.” Saken took a big pottery bowl, scooped in flour, and added a li
ttle water, stirring until she got a stiff dough. “It’s going to take you awhile to make as much bread as we’ll eat. Scoop out a ball, roll it, pat it flat and thin, and then cook it over a flat griddle. You want it cooked but still soft. You can snack on your mistakes; it’ll take you awhile to get the hang of it, don’t worry about that.” She demonstrated quickly, patting out a little round circle and baking it briefly on the griddle. “There. Fill these three baskets. When bread’s available, everyone always eats a lot of it. Have fun! Oh, and come get me if you have any questions.”

  It was a long, long afternoon. We sat close to the hot fire in the hot, dry sun, patting out little balls of dough and stacking the cooked pieces on a plate. The first couple came out much too brown, and we snacked on them, as Saken had suggested; the crunchy brown bread crackled in my mouth, and I ached to cook up the whole batch just like that and eat it all, just for a little variety. “Do you suppose they’ll toss us out into the desert if we don’t add the spices?” I asked Tamar. “I am so very tired of the spices the Alashi cook with . . .”

  Tamar laughed. “I know. I’m tempted, too. Maybe I’ll burn another piece of bread . . .” I burned one instead, and we shared it.

  We finished the bread and moved it into the supply tent to wait for dinner. I fetched down one of the pots Saken had pointed at earlier, and Tamar scooped rice out of the sack into the pot. She returned the scoop to the chest, and gasped.

  “What is it?” I moved over quickly, half expecting a mouse or some vermin in the food.

  “Shh!” Tamar glanced toward the door of the supply tent to make sure no one was in there with us. Then she pulled back one of the sacks to reveal what she’d seen. Honey. A single glass jar of dark amber liquid, sealed tight with beeswax and oiled linen.

  “This isn’t where the honey is stored,” Tamar whispered. “The honey is kept in the yurt; I’ve seen it. If anyone knew about this honey, it wouldn’t be here.” She extracted it delicately, closed the chest, and set the jar of honey on top. “We could share it between us.”

  Desire for the honey rose up like tears, and I caught my breath; my mouth watered. Without a word, I grabbed the plate of bread and took the top piece, ripping it in half. Tamar’s eyes glinted, and she had started to peel loose the wax seal when something occurred to me. “Wait,” I hissed.

  Tamar froze and looked at me. “What’s wrong?”

  “What if this is a test?”

  She pulled her hand back slowly. “A test like being sent out for the karenite?”

  “Yeah, exactly.” I put down the bread and looked in the chest with the rice, as if it might hold a clue to whether we were being tempted deliberately. “When we were slaves, if something like this came our way, we grabbed it. Because we were stealing from our owner—someone who was already stealing our freedom from us.” Tamar nodded. “But here—here, if we take the honey for ourselves, we’re stealing from our sisters. Maybe Janiya planted it where she knew we’d find it, to see what we would do.”

  Tamar’s eyes went wide. “I think you’re right.” Her face fell and she glared at the honey. “But I want some.”

  “Let’s offer it up with the meal. Share it with everyone. We’ll get some, then.”

  Tamar nodded. We set the honey aside and filled the rice pot at the stream, setting it on the fire to simmer. My suspicions were more or less confirmed when I saw Janiya watching us carefully from her spot in the shade. I grudgingly stirred spices into the lentils, despite being tempted to forget. We sat down to wait in the shade for dinner to be done.

  “Maybe we should ask Janiya before we bring out the honey,” I said.

  “No,” Tamar muttered. “She could just say no. It’s bad enough that we have to share it.”

  When the sisterhood gathered for dinner, we brought out the plates of bread, and then—with a smile and a flourish—the jar of honey. “We found it in the rice!” Tamar said. “Just wedged in between two sacks.”

  “We figured it must have been put there by accident,” I said. “Since it wasn’t set aside for anything and it wasn’t being saved for anything, we thought we could all eat it tonight.”

  There was a great deal of enthusiasm for that plan. Tamar and I managed to grab generous dollops of honey before it was all gone, and when all the loose honey had been eaten, we finished out the jar with our fingers. We probably should have made more bread; as it was, all the bread got eaten with the honey, rather than with the rice and lentils. Well, if this was all some sort of test, it wasn’t surprising that Saken had had us make bread. It had been intended to be eaten with the honey, assuming we were honest and passed the test.

  The meal done, we took the pots down to the river to scrub them out. Janiya approached a few minutes later, a big smile on her face. “You passed,” she said, and tossed each of us a blue bead.

  “What was the test?” Tamar asked. She feigned ignorance well.

  “Whether you would share the honey, or eat it yourselves. When slaves steal, they are stealing only from their master. When a member of the sisterhood steals, she steals from her family. You showed that you understand this.” Janiya nodded to each of us, and headed back to the main camp.

  We threaded the beads on our thong and retied them: two beads now. They clicked against each other on the string. I wondered how many more we had to earn. I slipped the thong back over my head, and continued to scrub out the pot.

  “I don’t deserve this,” Tamar said.

  I glanced at her; her face was hard and sad. “Why do you say that?”

  “I would have eaten the honey without a second thought. The only reason I didn’t was because you convinced me it was a test. That was the only reason.”

  “Then I don’t deserve it, either, because the only reason I didn’t eat the honey was that it occurred to me that it was a test.”

  Tamar was silent for a while. I could hear the scrape of sand against the inside of the pot. She dumped water inside, swirled it around, dumped it out, and checked the inside for food particles with her hand. She took another handful of sand and scrubbed some more. “I think we should tell Janiya,” she said. “When we’re done cleaning up. Confess to her. It’s not fair.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I hissed. “What if she takes back our beads?”

  “You said yourself you didn’t deserve yours, either.”

  I dunked my pot in the stream with a bit more vigor than was probably necessary, swirled the water, and dumped it out. Rinsed it again; it was clean. “Fine,” I said, finally. “You want to, we’ll go together and you can tell her.”

  Tamar was silent. When she had finished scrubbing her pot, we dried them out and carried them back to hang them up in the supply tent for tomorrow. Then we went to find Janiya. She was near the fire, listening to one of the other sisters singing a long, complicated ballad. “We have something to tell you,” Tamar said.

  “Yes?” Janiya looked both of us over; she wasn’t smiling now.

  “We guessed,” Tamar said rapidly. “That the honey was a test. We knew. That’s the main reason we didn’t eat it. Do you want your beads back?”

  Janiya’s lips quirked up, and for the first time I noticed that she had not one, but two dimples, one in each cheek. She grinned and then finally laughed out loud, just a little chuckle, not a mean one.

  “I’m glad you came to me,” she said when she had mostly regained control of her features. “The fact that you came to me to say this proves that you deserve the recognition for honesty. In fact, it demonstrates other things I like to see, too—like a trust that as the leader of this sisterhood, I am sensible and fair, and not as capriciously cruel as a Greek master of slaves.” My heart leapt, and sure enough, out of her pocket came two more blue beads. She handed one to each of us, and then patted Tamar on the shoulder. “Quit worrying, new sisters, and go to bed. You’ve had a very long day.”

  I dreamed that night of running. Again, I was surrounded by waving grass on the dark plain, and I knew that Sophos was follo
wing me. Kyros, I thought, but the part of me that knew I was dreaming knew that I couldn’t scream, because I would wake up the sisters . . . I bit down on my fear, and kept running, though my legs slowed as if they were tangled in a net, and my chest felt as if it would burst from fear. I can never run fast enough to escape. I can never run far enough to escape. I can’t call for help. There’s nowhere left that’s safe . . .

  I reached out, desperately, toward the blackness above me, and with a twist of strength that came from some mysterious place within, I ripped a hole in the night sky, thinking, There, I can hide there . . .

  But beyond, there was a flash of light, and then a sudden rush of wind that lifted me up and blew me back to awareness. I woke with a gasp, but knew that at least this time I hadn’t screamed. My ears were very cold, as if the rush of wind had been something real. My heart was pounding.

  I ran my fingers over my three beads as I lay in the dark, trying to calm myself, and thought about that strange wind. At least tonight I didn’t have to remove myself from the tent to placate my irritable tent-mates, but it still took me a long time to fall back to sleep. As I hovered on the edge of sleep, I thought I heard a voice whisper, “Gate,” and then darkness swallowed me again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Saken fetched me from grooming the horses to tell me that the felt was done. I must have looked at her blankly because she laughed and said, “Come on, you need to be there.” I put down the brush and curry comb and followed her back to the main part of camp.

  The felt was still bound with the straps that had been used the last time it was unrolled and rerolled, though the more delicate strips of cloth that had been tied by Jolay had worn away or snapped off as the rolled-up felt bounced and tossed over the ground behind someone’s horse. Now Janiya unbound the straps and kicked out the reed mats so that the felt unrolled completely. Saken, Ruan, Jolay, and Zhanna each took a corner and peeled it carefully back from the mat. It stayed together, a solid black mass.