Sugar and Other Stories

by A. S. Byatt

  It became widely accepted that A-Oa was a jinx when she cured the running sores on Bo-Me’s son’s legs. It was also of course accepted that A-Oa had caused these sores, had started to suck out the child’s life through the sores, through the daily thickening yellow pus on which flies gathered. Bo-Me spoke very casually to A-Oa one day at the edge of the tank, addressing her respectfully for the first time as “Mother”. “My Cha-Tin is sickening, Mother,” said Bo-Me. “There are wet wells on his legs and he is shrivelling away. I have asked everyone for advice and no one has been able to help me. Do you happen to know of any remedy I might try?” Bo-Me knew, and A-Oa knew, that to a close friend, a mother or a sister, Bo-Me would have said that some witch or jinx was attacking the child with her thoughts, or with spells. But she answered in kind, that she had various remedies her mother had taught her, it might be that one of them would prove helpful. Bo-Me should bring the child to her house at dusk. When he came, walking painfully, his sharp little face fearful, A-Oa made Bo-Me wait outside the kitchen whilst she took the boy in and touched his stick-legs with various bunches of fronds and put a mixture of mashed bitter herbs and spiderweb, about which all the women knew, on the bubbling places. She reached down into one of her tall jars and pulled a pickled lime from its darkness. “Eat this,” she said. “It will bring the water back to where it should be, under your tongue.” The boy stared at her with dark, serious eyes. “Thank you, old one,” he said. “It is nothing,” said A-Oa, and took him back to his mother. “He will get well now,” she told Bo-Me, and he did.

  Then there was Di-Nan’s diarrhoea, which she cured with a seed-pellet and the instruction to walk four times round the periphery of the village from left to right and four times in the other direction. There was a pig of Ta-Shin’s, that wouldn’t eat, that lay on its side making self-pitying moans, which, grown confident now, she cured simply by predicting that it would stand again, if it was starved for two days, on the second day, and should be fed three hours after it stood. She had respect: grandmothers brought her small gifts of preserved fat or cooked rice: she was greeted deferentially in the streets. “Go well, Mother.” Something had happened, but it was neither what she had hoped for nor what she, more obscurely, waited for, with a fear like a hot stone inside her. Then the boy came, Bo-Me’s second son, not the tiny Cha-Tin but the beautiful, gleaming Cha-Hun, his long black hair plaited down his spine and moving like a bright snake as he shook his head. He was a young man, not a boy, A-Oa saw, as he sauntered past her door, the muscles of his buttocks standing out, and his stomach hard and small and taut. When he had gone past, casually, casually, he came back, even more casually, and leaned on her doorpost, glancing quickly into the dark inside of her house.

  “How is it with you, Mother?”

  “Well enough. And the little brother?”

  “Skipping like a young goat. A marvel of your working. May I come in, Mother, out of the sun and the dusty street?”

  “I am too old to forbid you,” said A-Oa drily, meaning that there would have been a time when it would have been sinful and punishable for him to enter a house alone with a woman who was no kin of his, but that now it was not, for she was no woman, she was something else.

  He came in, like bright dark oil poured into a cup and sat on the ground, sniffling the smells of her house, taking in the bunches in the roof, the bedlinen, the cleanliness, the journeying hen. In the dark some of his confidence deserted him. He looked up at A-Oa as a child might look, expecting a sweet, or comfort, or knowledge of his predicament to come automatically to her, as knowledge of the gas in a baby’s stomach comes to its mother, when its face puckers, and she helps it. A-Oa, no mother, stepped back a pace or two, and looked impassively down on Cha-Hun, waiting. The bright light in the doorway was temporarily blocked by bulk: the dark hump of Kun’s fat shoulders was there, and then his frowning face, peering for a long moment before his slippers flapped away. Cha-Hun was rattled and began one of those interminable polite conversations the villagers delighted in, discussing the health of every man and woman, from the headman down to the newest baby, and then moving on to cows and bean fields, pumpkins and honey bees, all discussed and named safely and in order. A-Oa answered politely — there were ritual prescribed responses which she gave absently — and watched him. After a little time, Kun passed again, in the opposite direction, on the other side of the street. They saw him stare in at the doorway as he passed. Cha-Hun rose to leave. In the doorway, he said, following nothing that had gone before, “And charms, Mother? Do you make charms, not to take away sickness, other charms?”

  “It could be so,” said A-Oa, from the inside. “How can I say, not knowing what you might require?”

  “Oh, it is not for me,” said Cha-Hun, turning on his heel, too lightly. “May I come again and pass the time of day?”

  “Any day,” said A-Oa.

  When he had gone, she talked over the talk they had had, he and she, with her hen, until she found the flaw in it. There was a member of his own immediate family he had not mentioned, when enumerating them all in order. A member he should have dwelt on with particular respect. “I think that is it,” said A-Oa to the hen. They sat side by side on the floor, and A-Oa pulled thread from goats’ hair. The hen settled comfortably, fluffing up its breast feathers in the dust. “Does he want a love-charm, or a poison, or perhaps one first and then the other?” said A-Oa to the hen which stared with one round, silly eye. “Shall we help him, or leave him to cry and be safe?”

  The one he had left unnamed was his elder brother’s young wife, An-At. His elder brother, like A-Oa’s husband, but hardly so willing, it seemed likely, had been taken by the army, at the beginning of the dry season a year ago, when An-At, child and woman, had barely stepped over his mother’s threshold. Bo-Me’s family was large and vigorous and noisy: the girl had come from a neighbouring village and had cost two goats, several sacks of grain and an unusual metal cooking pot a travelling soldier in Bo-Me’s family had once brought back from beyond the mountains. (Soldiers did come back, with hacked ankles, with burned-out eyes, with rotted fingers, those neither dead nor useful nor wholly incapable of the struggle to return.) The girl was thin and fastidious, picking at her food and saying little, occasionally smiling a momentary, secretive, contemptuous smile. Bo-Me did not like her. She worked, the village said, but foolishly made it seem as though she didn’t, appeared to move lazily, to sit around languidly when her tasks had been rapidly done. She spent time combing and coiling and loosing her beautiful hair: when her husband had been at home, she had put flowers in it, and some beaded pins and ties which she had brought with her and now no longer wore.

  In large households, everyone slept together. It was not permissible for a man to enter the women’s quarters, or to be alone in a house with an unmarried woman to whom he was not related. It was permissible for him to share a bed with his brother’s wife, his sister, but not of course to touch her. He must sleep as though long knives lay between them. So she had slept with Da-Shin, in the early years a boy, and then not. Night after night, never looking at each other, hearing each other breathe. The penalty for putting a hand across those invisible knives, a hand flung in sleep, a hand darkly unrelated to the still-sleeping face on the pillow, was death. Death for the woman, that was. Expulsion from the family for the man, if the family chose to enforce it. They often did not: men were rare in the village and such temptations were understood to be the fault of women — it was their nature. A-Oa believed it was their nature, as she had been taught. She also knew what Cha-Hun wanted from her, which was something not so natural.

  During the next day or two she observed, without surprise and without alarm — only with an increase in the heat and bulk of the dry hot stone inside her — that Kun was following Cha-Hun. He stood in his doorway and watched the young men go out to work: that was usual: he stood behind them, at a quiet distance, when they sat in the street in the shadow and argued: that was also usual. But when Cha-Hun came out alone, perha
ps to the water-tank, perhaps to relieve himself in the fields, perhaps simply to stroll past A-Oa’s front door and think of returning to make the request he hadn’t made, the heavy figure came behind him, lightly, lightly, rolling along with his fat calves above his folded ankles, his face bland and empty. So he had once followed Da-Shin, who had been neither the first nor the last. The women said of him that he was like a woman, and shuddered a little: they knew what they meant by this but there were no stories to tell about Kun as there had been about other soft men who followed boys, or soft boys who followed soldiers. Kun had been married some time in the dark past. His wife had been put to death for trying to bewitch him, to gain control over his thoughts with little cakes made of honey and other things, unmentionable. He had had no child and had never remarried. A-Oa did not know what the men said about Kun’s padding surveillances. She had foolishly never spoken to Da-Shin about it. Things between her and Da-Shin had been all unspoken, a bulk of silence, substantial and shadowy as Kun himself. On the night when Kun talked to Da-Shin she had wished that she had said something, asked something, used words. But words were unnecessary and dangerous. She would say to Cha-Hun, from her new authority, when he came back, “Watch Kun.”

  He came back of course. He sat inside her doorway, his face pulled long with passion, his eyes glittering, and Kun passed by, inclining his head, tucking in his chins, compressing his lips in that way he had, to hold back breath, speech, anything. “Can you make a love-charm, Mother?” Cha-Hun blurted out, clasping his squatting knees with desperate fingers, meeting her eye and then dropping his gaze. A-Oa in her dry distance thought he was a love-charm in himself and said, to mock him, “I do not see how you should need such a thing, Cha-Hun.”

  “It is not for me.”

  “If I am to make such a thing, I must have truth.”

  He frowned, and committed himself. “The girl — is not mine. She does not see me.”

  “You can surely make her see you.”

  “She cannot. She must.”

  “If she should be forbidden,” said A-Oa, out of sadness, “nothing can come of this but death and misery. This you know.”

  “Nothing can come of it but — something — I must have — a joy — I would pay for with my life, with my life, gladly.” It will not be your life, A-Oa thought of saying, and was prevented, partly by a memory of Da-Shin, vanished overnight, to where, to what fate? And by her own mean awareness of the force of his youth, maybe the girl’s youth, that blazed and would not be denied. So she would help it along, would she? Help them to burn? If that was what they wanted.

  She told him the things he must bring, things not easily obtained, hairs, slivers of nail, the girl’s blood, seeds from the sacks in her kitchen and honey from her combs, flour she had ground, and seed of his own which she would mix, when the moon was right, with things she herself would bring and which he would cook, in a way she would show him, in his own way. Cha-Hun glowered at the earth and said it would not be easy. His pale tongue moistened his gold-shadowed lips, with distaste, with anxiety, with desire? A-Oa sat dry beside him and said sharply that he could not expect such a thing to be easy, it was difficult and dangerous, as what he wanted was difficult and dangerous. If in the honeycomb was embedded a hatching bee, drowned in its own running amber, this was particularly propitious, though not absolutely necessary. She must have these in the third week of the waxing moon, if it could be managed. Otherwise Cha-Hun must wait, another month.

  A shadow crossed their talk, heaved raggedly across Cha-Hun’s silk shoulders and A-Oa’s watching face, turned up sideways towards him, like the hen. Kun stood in the doorway, his hand on her door-frame, his fat body between her and the square of sun.

  “Can I help you, Kun?” she said, naming him directly, which in certain ways was unlucky, or threatening, depending on whether either of them, he or she, had any power of ill-will.

  “I trust Cha-Tin is well,” he said by way of answer, gloomily.

  “As a young goat, says Cha-Hun,” replied A-Oa.

  “Let us all hope he continues so,” said Kun, with heavy politeness, and heaved himself lightly away again. The hot stone inside A-Oa shifted in its dark furnace. She opened her mouth to say to Cha-Hun, watch Kun, and could not speak for dryness, could not summon moisture even to croak. In any case to speak was surely unnecessary. Cha-Hun was no fool. He must know. Moreover, no one could avoid Kun, if they were not fated to be able to. Kun made it his business to know things. Cha-Hun was peculiarly his business. She had seen Kun’s eyes, calculating pig’s eyes, measure herself, her dry self.

  He came back, Cha-Hun, with his little leaf-wrapped packets and clay pots, within the allotted time, and at night, knocking at her door softly under the misshapen moon that lurched above the mountain. His hands were ostentatiously empty: inside he drew the things from here and there, knotted inside his loincloth, and laid them out before her, explaining curtly and with distaste what each was, though not how he had obtained it, as other anxious clients might have done, demonstrating their resourcefulness or good faith. She took the things from him in the metal-light and carried them back into her kitchen, back to the secret altar. When Cha-Hun came back, as instructed, the next day, she had mixed them with secrets of her own, liquids and solids of her own, some of the old woman’s mushroom-flesh crumbled to powder, a speck of snakeskin, a scrap of rat stain. Under her eyes Cha-Hun himself shaped them all in a wooden bowl, his long fingers sticky with honey and rusty with blood, doing woman’s work, awkwardly making the cake that he must then, she told him, cook in the heat of his own body until the new moon. She showed him, as was necessary, where to put the cake to cook, and as her fingers indicated drily, here, he hung his head and watched his prick curve and helplessly rise with its own life towards her, hot-red and wet and shining. That is a good sign, she told the hot and trembling boy, that shows the magic is good, that the cake is right, that the charm will work. After the cooking, you must give it to her to eat, or if you think she will not, hide it in her food. It is better if she takes it all at once, willingly, but you are the judge of that. And he stood there, shamed and eager, his thin, strong rod swaying blindly upright like a charmed snake’s hood, after her hand. And she felt her own scraping, squeaking dryness and said Go now, before anyone comes. Meaning Kun, but she dared not name him.

  That night she dreamed of the boy, or perhaps not of that boy but of Da-Shin, as he had once been, naked and risen like that boy. She often thought of Da-Shin as though he had been there last week, or yesterday, as though the shock of his departure was fresh, although it must, she saw now, have been years, many years, since he went. This boy, who she thought of as Da-Shin’s contemporary, was in fact nearer in age to her own buried sons, those tiny, fragile, male bodies. In her dreams she reached out to embrace him, reached up from amongst her quilts to clutch him as he bent over her, intent and golden, and her hands and her mind slipped through him, grey and vanishing. It was not that she desired the boy: she desired only to be able to desire him, and was dry. So she played with his spirit, teased and teasing, impotent.

  The new moon came and went. Cha-Hun did not come to say whether his cake had been accepted or not, openly or by trickery. In the street he avoided A-Oa’s eye and Kun padded after him. He did not need to tell A-Oa whether he had been successful: it shone from him, from his gleaming plait to his cocky strut, from his involuntary singing to his swinging arms. The girl too had lost her lethargy. She was restless and lively: she swept what had already been swept: she ran to and from the tank, smiling. What A-Oa could deduce Kun too could deduce, probably, though not certainly, her own part in it, which she was privately sure was wholly unnecessary. Then the smiling of An-At was replaced by a deepening frown, and the light running by a hunched plodding. A-Oa waited. A train of events had been set in motion. When the screaming began, she assumed that the voice was An-At’s. It began early one morning, before dawn, one huge howl and then a choking wail, then another huge howl, a voice to swallow the m
oon. Doors opened, bare feet padded on the street. A crowd gathered in the grey, behind Kun, who was there first, quietly ready. Bo-Me burst out of her house tearing herself away from the frightened restraining hands of An-At and Cha-Hun, lashing her hair from side to side like an enraged beast, rolling in the dust, howling. She is possessed, said one. The house is cursed, said another. Her son is killed by witchcraft, said An-At. Cha-Tin is dead where he was sleeping. A witch has come at night and sucked out his soul, said Kun. Perhaps. My house is cursed, shrieked Bo-Me, from the dust. My child is killed and my hearth is dishonoured. A-Oa stood at her own door and wondered if they would behead An-At. It was her brain that wondered this, occupying itself vainly. The fat hen came running out beside her, dusty-feathered. She knew very well where the blame would be laid, where the evil would be detected. She had always known. She wanted to go to Bo-Me and say, it is terrible, the death of a son, and knew she could not and must not. The death of her own sons, her grief, Da-Shin, her dryness had brought about this evil, this death in its turn. Her pain was responsible. Let us look into this, Kun said, as she had always known he would say. Let us think clearly where the witchcraft is in this village, where this evil begins. And the gathering turned round, away from Bo-Me’s sobbing, and looked at A-Oa with its common intention, its single thought.