Chapter 4
Loss
Margot shivered again. She wouldn’t stop shivering.
I worried at my lower lip and put another blanket over her. Outside of the tent, a child shrieked, and answering footfalls spoke to a game of chase or tag or perhaps just “run run run.” The sound of their game faded fast, and soon, all I could hear was Margot, the healer, breathing hard and shallow. I waited until her eyelids drifted shut before sliding my sandals on and slipping out through the tentflap.
I blinked into the grey light of the morning mist, wiping sweat from my brow. The wispy fog that clung to the camp rendered the day eerily quiet — the crunch of the gravel under my sandals seemed overloud. The running children were already well out of earshot. I passed dewdrop-covered tents, the families inside enjoying a morning’s rest. The transition from the sands to the rock flats had been a taxing one, steep and arduous. Two wagons had thrown wheels, and the seed-wagon’s axle had split, and we’d had to slaughter a good ox after his leg fractured under the strain of the climb. Everyone was tired, snippy. I’d already decided to take a day’s rest, even before Margot had gotten sick.
“Please, please, please preserve her,” I prayed under my breath. “Please.”
The Gods did not answer.
“Are you talking to yourself?” A face appeared out of the mist, and I smiled even as I saw my friend’s eyes flick away from mine. Naomi still wasn’t used to the Gods Sight. I couldn’t blame her.
“It sure feels like it sometimes,” I said. “What are you doing up?”
“Checking the oxen,” she said, running a hand through her short cap of tight blonde curls. They had relaxed into loose waves while we were on the sands, but the low-slung clouds on the rock flats had sprung them back into spirals, and I couldn’t help thinking the humidity suited her. “If we lose another one, we’ll have to abandon a wagon.”
She looked at me, her mouth pinched with expectation, and I realized that she wasn’t talking to me as her friend. She was talking to me as her Prophetess. “Oh,” I said, blinking a few times. “Oh, right. We, uh, we would probably need to abandon the children’s wagon, right?”
She gave me a gentle smile. “We abandoned that one when we came down the mountain into the sands,” she said softly. I chastised myself for missing that — but then I remembered with a start that when we’d come down the mountain into the sands, my father had begun to die. “I think we’d need to consider consolidating the water wagon and the seed wagon.”
I laughed, a short, sharp bark that was swallowed by the mist. “I’ll let you be the one to tell Liam that,” I said, and her smile twitched. I cleared my throat. “Is there anything that can be done to keep us from losing an animal? We only have to stretch them for nine more months.” I tried hard to keep a note of pleading from entering my voice.
“Is that guaranteed?” she murmured, and if she hadn’t been my best friend — but then I remembered that I was the Prophetess, and that I had a job to do.
“It is written,” I said, gentle but stern. “It will come to pass. Nine more months.”
“Right,” she said. “Sorry.” She still wouldn’t meet my eyes.
I suppressed a sigh. “So, anything I can do to help get us there?”
“I’d like to have Margot take a look at a few of the beasts,” she said.
“Margot’s sick,” I said. “She’s — I don’t think she’s up for it.”
“Sick?” Naomi’s brow creased. “Margot can’t get sick. Healers never get sick.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s… I shouldn’t go into details, but.” But it looks bad. But I don’t know how to fix it. But I’m afraid.”But I can’t make her come do an exam.”
Naomi waved her hand, tossing her curls. “She’s probably just tired,” she said. “We’re all tired, Fisher. You can send her over once she’s rested, yeah? I’ve done what I can for the animals, but it’s hard to identify weaknesses in the bones and I’m worried about—”
“She can’t help you,” I interrupted. Her mouth snapped shut with a click of teeth. “Is there anything else?”
Her nostrils flared, and a muscle jumped in her jaw several times before she finally bit out an answer. “I suppose you could pray, Prophetess.”
I nodded. “I always do.”
• • • •
The mist was still low by the time I came back to Margot’s tent. A bowl of broth steamed in my hand, a match to the one that warmed my belly. A few precious shreds of uncured ox haunch floated in the bowl, my own ration as well as Margot’s. The majority of the animal was already packed in salt, but this, at least, we could spare.
I knelt at the edge of the healer’s sleeping mat, balancing the broth in one hand. I touched the back of my hand to her forehead in a vague echo of a fuzzy childhood memory: my mother’s cool fingers on my own blazing cheeks.
Except that Margot’s skin wasn’t blazing. She’d been shivering all night, grappling with an untenable fever, reminding me more of my father with every passing moment — but now, her forehead was cool. Her fever had broken.
“Thank the Gods,” I whispered, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Relief and fatigue made me suddenly giddy. I set the bowl down beside her and sprang up to find Naomi, to tell her that Margot would be able to check the beasts of burden the next day, once she’d finished recovering. But as I reached for the tentflap, something shifted in my belly. I pressed my palm to the shallow rise of my abdomen, and felt the shift again — the bottom dropping out of a bottle, the brush of a finger against my cheek in the night. Gods Whispers rose around me like the crashing of waves.
I turned around and looked to Margot again. My eyes slid away from her face, and I looked at the bowl of broth next to her. Steam no longer rose from the surface of the bowl. A chill passed through the room.
It was the chill of a light extinguishing.
I looked back at Margot. Slowly, I stepped back toward her. My breathing was loud inside the tent, too loud. I inhaled deeply through my nose and then did not breathe again.
The Gods Whispers ceased. The tent was silent.
“Oh,” I whispered. “Oh, no.” I reached for Margot’s cool, clammy face. Her skin still felt like skin; her cheeks were the same shade of brown that they had been before she took ill. I pressed a finger to the underside of her jaw, to the inside of her wrist. I pressed my ear to her chest, and when I lifted my head, two broad dark tearstains marked the sheet that covered her.
I sat back on my heels and stared at the dead healer, and waited for Gods Whispers to return and guide me. I waited for them to tell me what to do, how to proceed, how to tell my people that the only healer in their midst was gone.
But the Gods Whispers did not come.
Chapter 5
Fear
“Please O Gods, reveal unto me your wisdom.”
I spoke the words with sincerity in my heart as I prepared to open the chest that contained the Word of the Gods. It was a prayer that I was meant to repeat before looking at the tablets, although my father had told me once that forgetting the prayer didn’t prevent the Gods Sight from working.
Still.
I dipped my fingers into the divot in the top of the chest and touched them to my tongue. The Prophet — my father — had carved it, along with the rest of the chest, according to a vision sent by the Gods on the eve of his first step out of the city. He had carved it by moonlight, with Gods Whispers in his ears and prayers in his heart, and the Gods themselves had guided his hands. The divot in the top of the chest described a perfect hemisphere, and was filled at all times with water, and it was by the work of the Gods that not a drop ever spilled. Not when we climbed into the mountain passes; not when the earth itself shook beneath our feet. Never.
This was known to the people of the pilgrimage, and the story was never far from their minds. How could it be? They saw the chest every time we moved it from tent to wagon and back again, and the wood was worn smooth from the reverent tou
ches they laid upon it whenever it was within reach. They knew that the tablets were inside the chest, and that it had been shaped by the shared intention of the Prophet and the Gods.
But they didn’t know the final miracle of the chest. They didn’t know that the water in the divot — the water which was freshened from my own waterskin every time that use and evaporation lowered the level to a shallow pool — landed salty on my tongue. Not the salt of my fingers, this; no. This was the thick, acid brine of the Gods’ own tears.
The Prophet had explained it to me after I’d first prayed over the tablets. He’d said that the Gods were weeping for us, that they wept every time the sun rose and we were still not home in the Promised Land. He said that the taste of the saltwater was a reminder: the Gods are waiting.
As the bitterness faded from my tongue, the baby stirred in my belly. I pressed one hand to the chest that held the tablets, and said my prayer one more time before lifting the lid.
The tablets rested inside, wrapped in linen and pillowed on a bed of clean, dry timothy grass. They were ragged at the ends, broken pieces of massive bones, carved across the full breadth of their surfaces with trailing Gods Words. They were lighter than they looked.
I lifted the second tablet out, ignoring the first — the things predicted on that one had already come to pass.
“Please, O Gods,” I whispered, “in your wisdom and mercy. Please tell me you have a plan to find us a new healer.” Gods Whispers rustled as though from a great distance, and a shiver of worry hissed along the back of my neck.
I unwrapped the tablet and let my eyes fall to the etched bone.
To anyone without the Gods Sight — including me, until the night my father died — the markings looked like irregular, trailing scratches. But I could read them. By the grace of the Gods, through the Gods Sight gift my father had passed on to me before his death, I could read them.
I scanned the tablet over and over. I saw rain and loss and conflict and pain, but nothing about the loss of our healer. Nothing about how I was supposed to birth this baby without the help of a midwife.
“Please,” I started to pray again, “please oh Gods, please, please—” but then there were gravel-crunching footsteps outside, running fast, and I barely had time to cover the tablet with linen before someone was bursting into my tent.
“Fisher— oh, Gods, I’m sorry.” Rand, the child-minder, pulled up short, his sandals scuffing on the floor of my tent.
“It’s fine, Rand,” I said, carefully wrapping the tablet and placing it back into the chest. I closed the lid, slowly, reverently. I rose to my feet, wrapping my shawl more tightly around my shoulders to fight the chill of the rock flats, and faced him. “What is it?”
“We’ve lost one of the children,” he said. His face was grey with fear. “We’ve looked everywhere, but she’s gone. Mischa, Pinar’s girl… she disappeared this morning while the children were playing look-and-find, and I can’t—”
“Has a search party already been formed?” I asked briskly, already wrapping my feet in a few layers of wool. Rand wasn’t wearing his — his feet were bare in his sandals, and his toes were white from the cold and the damp. I threw a roll of wrappings to him, and he wrapped his feet as he answered.
“Yes,” he said, “and they’re out in the flats now. I don’t know if we’ll find the girl, though, the fog is so thick—”
“We’ll find her,” I said. But I remembered the loss that was written on the tablets, and I wondered if this was what the Gods were warning me about.
“But, Prophetess,” he said, his voice as soft as secrets. “I don’t think she wandered off by accident, see?”
“What do you mean?” I whispered back, drawn in by the hush of his voice.
“I mean,” he said, looking around as though there were ears inside my tent, “that I think maybe she was taken.”
I laughed before I could stop myself, a short, sharp bark of surprise. “Taken? By who? Who would take a child?”
Rand was not amused, and his brow darkened. “Them you named last month, Fisher,” he said grimly. “The outsiders. Everyone knows that Northerners have…” he paused significantly. “Appetites.”
I threw an extra cloak over my shoulders, then made for the tentflap. Rand did not move out of my way, and I stared up at him with as much patience as I could muster. Rand was an ox of a man, perfect for child-minding, but he was stubborn, too.
“The outsiders,” I repeated. “The outsiders, meaning, the woman and child we brought in?” He nodded. “The child being the one that you watch, the boy who’s been helping feed the babies every day? And the woman being the one who taught your Magda how to bake a loaf without burning it? Those outsiders?”
Rand’s jaw worked for a moment as he considered whether to dig in his heels. I could see him weighing his fear against his conscience.
Fear won.
“I don’t trust them,” he said. “They’re not our people. I’m telling you, they’re responsible for this.”
I fastened my cloak and pushed past him. “Save your blame, Rand. There’s no time now. I’ve got to talk to Pinar, and you’ve got to find Mischa. Go on.”
At that moment, a wail rang out across the camp. I winced. It was unmistakably Pinar, Mischa’s father. The news of his daughter’s disappearance had reached him before I could. I bit back a curse and stepped out into the fog.
“Come on,” I called back to Rand. “Let’s find her.”
Chapter 6
Discovery
I held Pinar’s hand as he wept for his daughter.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and his shoulders shuddered. He was so thin — he hadn’t eaten since Mischa went missing three weeks before. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “We have to go.”
He nodded. He knew that we were already risking everything by staying in the rock flats as long as we had — the grasslands waited, and the tablets were clear that we needed to reach them before the dead moon was in the sky if we were going to make it to the Promised Land at the appointed time. Still, he gripped me with the fervor of an argument.
“One more night,” he whispered. “She’ll come back. She has to.”
“Pinar,” I murmured. “We’ve sent out search parties as far as they can go. She’s gone.” I had practiced this part with Marc that morning, lying in our bed with his ear to my belly. “She’s gone, and we have to leave.”
“Leave me here, then,” he said weakly. I leaned forward and pressed my lips to his forehead. My eyes were dry, and I clenched them shut.
“No,” I said against his skin. When I walked out of his small tent, a hundred eyes were pretending not to watch me. I walked to the tent of the pathfinder to order the breaking of camp. Pinar’s muffled sobs cut through the silent camp, and a hundred eyes looked away.
• • • •
“Fisher.” Jonah, my best scout, appeared through the fog just seconds after his footfalls announced him. “Prophetess, you have to come. You have to see— we found something.”
“What is it?” I asked, and the boy looked up at me with shining eyes.
“Dinosaurs,” he breathed.
We’d been driving the animals hard all day, and they were overdue for a rest anyway. I called a halt. The wagon train formed a rough circle, and Naomi took the sheep and goats out into the fog to find good grazing. I caught her arm as she passed.
“Don’t go too far, all right?”
She nodded and gave my hand a squeeze. “You either,” she said.
• • • •
Jonah led me to the place where he’d found the dinosaurs. We rode mules, rude and short but nimble on the tricky parts of the rock flats where they transitioned into clay. The fog was thick and omnipresent, and I wondered how Jonah could possibly find his way — but then, that’s why he was a scout.
“Look,” he said.
I looked into the fog and saw nothing. “What?” I squinted.
“There.” He tugged his mule’s reins until it was rig
ht next to mine, and he pointed so that I could peer along his arm. There, perhaps four wagon-lengths in front of us, a shadow loomed out of the white.
“Oh,” I said, and then I was off my mule and walking through sticky clay toward the shadow. “Oh,” I said again.
He’d been telling the truth. Dinosaurs. Not live ones, of course — bones, huge skeletons half-buried, jutting out of the ground like a forest of branchless trees. I ran my hand along a massive, curved rib. As we walked into the field of bones, the fog thinned, and I could see entire skeletons — huge curving spines, and ribs that splayed out like spread fingers, their tips resting on the earth. Fins, their outlines still clear in the heavy soil, their bones like knuckles on the ground. Massive toothless skulls with long, strange mandibles. “The Prophet told me about dinosaurs he saw before I was born, but I never thought I’d see one,” I whispered. “Gods be praised.”
As soon as the blessing passed my lips, the Gods Whispers began, so loud I couldn’t bear them. They were too much, too many, too fast and too sharp. I clapped my hands over my ears, but they only got louder. Animal panic made my heart stutter, and before I knew what I was doing I was running. I ran into the grove of bones, my feet slipping in the clay. I ran directly into the cathedral ribcage of one of the dinosaurs, finbones scattering behind me — and the Gods Whispers fell away.
The silence was overwhelming. I could hear my heartbeat thudding in my ears, the rasp of my breathing, Jonah’s distant shouting. Overhead, arching ribs almost met. I looked down to see that I was standing on a half-buried vertebra: the creature had died on her back. I wiped at a tickle on my neck and my hand came away red: a trickle of blood was running from one of my ears.
“Gods,” I wiped my hand on my cloak. The fog swirled in currents around me, and I laid a hand on the dinosaur’s bone.
I snatched my hand back immediately, swearing, shaking my fingers — the bone had… burned.
The Long List Anthology Volume 4 Page 18
