by S. D. Tower
“Ah,” Adumar said, and shook her graying hair away from her forehead. She flopped a dough round onto the pile of unbaked loaves. “So you’re home, are you? Home at last, I should say, you lazy, useless good-for-nothing!”
I was in serious trouble, and that added a spice of satisfaction to Adumar’s sharp voice. She was a tall, spare woman, and as she dusted flour from her long hands, the backs of my legs tingled with painful apprehension.
“Speak up, Lale,” Aunt Tamzu snapped. Tamzu was as gaunt as her sister, and through her eyes a malicious, narrow intelligence glowered at the world. She detested me almost as much as did Adumar.
I risked a glance at Rana, who was watching me glumly. Unlike her sisters-in-law, she occasionally showed me a little warmth: a pat on the head instead of a swat, a smile when I tried to make a child’s joke. But the aunts ruled her, and she never intervened on my behalf when they were at me.
Indeed, if she’d had a bad day with them or with Detrim, she was happy to apply the switch to me herself.
“Where were you, Lale?” Rana asked. Her voice was angry, though not as angry as Adumar’s.
I burst into tears, not altogether feigned. For more drama, I fell to my knees, hung my head, and sobbed piteously.
“What’s the matter with the child?” Tamzu exclaimed. My behavior had startled them. I’d sometimes cry during a bad switching, if only to make them think I’d been punished enough, but otherwise I never let them see me weep. I hoped that breaking down like this would make my story all the more convincing.
Adumar clamped her fingers on my shoulder and dragged me to my feet. “Stop it, this instant. Stop your blubbering, girl!” She gave me a tooth-rattling shake. “What are you going on about?”
“Soldiers,” I sobbed. “At the ford over Hatch Creek. I couldn’t stop them.”
Rana gave a frightened exclamation and Tamzu blurted, “What soldiers? Coming this way?”
“I don’t know. There were three of them. They talked about a boat. I don’t know where they were from.” My sobs redoubled. I was still frightened, but I felt things were going pretty well. “They made—they made me—” I lapsed into choked snuffles, which gave me a chance to see how they were reacting. Their faces wore peculiar expressions, which I interpreted favorably.
“What did they make you do?” Adumar demanded. She sounded odd.
“Auntie, they made me lose the needles. They caught me and they kept asking where our silver was in the village. I said we didn’t have any money—we’re so poor. But they just laughed at me. Then they hit me. I was afraid they’d kill me. They had swords, like the ones who robbed us before.” “You’re sure there were only three?” Tamzu said in a worried voice. “It must have been a scouting party. But how did they get upriver, if they were from Kayan?”
“Didn’t you hear her, Tamzu?” Adumar exclaimed furiously. “The little wretch has lost our needles! That’s what she’s trying to make us forget with this drivel about soldiers!” “But, Auntie, it’s true! They were thereV Adumar shook me again, eyes narrowed. “Then why didn’t they slit your gullet? They knew you’d warn us.”
I hadn’t prepared for this one. “I got away,” I said desperately. “They chased me but I got away.”
Rana said, “Maybe they didn’t dare go after her. She says there were only three of them. Or maybe they were bandits. Not soldiers at all.”
“Then which were they?” Tamzu snapped at me. “Soldiers or bandits?”
My hopes rose. Rana and Tamzu at least were nosing into my net. But before I could go on, Adumar said: “So you lost the needles while they were chasing you?”
“Auntie, I couldn’t help it! I was running downstream and I fell and I think I lost them then in the creek.” I burst into tears again.
“I don’t think so,” Adumar snapped. Her fingers tightened painfully in the hollow of my shoulder. “I think this is not what happened at all.”
“But, Auntie, I swear it did! I swear it on the shrine of the ancestors!” And if they didn’t like my false oath, they’d just have to put up with it. They weren’t my ancestors.
“They’re not your ancestors,” Adumar said in a voice like a grindstone. “TTiey wouldn’t have you in the family, you little liar. You’re a deceiver and a blasphemer—calling on our shrine to witness your lies. No soldiers would be upriver of us. There were no soldiers—^you threw the needles away out of spite! You knew how much they were worth.” She took a shuddering breath. “Those needles were the price of my brother’s boat.” She looked wildly around, took two swift paces to the comer, and seized one of the heavy canes that Detrim used to drive swine. Then she turned on me, hefting the stick in a white-knuckled hand. “You’ve ruined us, you little shegesh. And you did it on purpose.”
“I didn’t, I didn’t,” I cried, terror surging through me. That stick could break my bones. “Please, Auntie, it’s the truth. I swear it. They were chasing me. If I’d stopped they’d have killed me.”
“Small loss,” Adumar said in a terrible voice. My knees were weak as sand. I tumed to flee but Adumar’s talons seized me by the hair, hauHng me upright so that I was half dangling by my tresses. I shrieked and rose on tiptoes to stop the pain.
Before me, the doorway darkened as a man filled it. It was Detrim, back early from the river.
“What’s this?” he asked in his reedy voice. “What’s going on? Who’s been trying to kill who?”
“You’ll kill the little wretch yourself,” Adumar said furiously, “when you hear what she’s done.” She let me find my feet but kept her grip on my hair. I stood very still. I could not imagine what Detrim might do to me. Perhaps he would kill me. If what Adumar said was true, I might just as well have burned his fishing boat. He might not care much about his sisters or his wife, but he cared about that boat.
“What? What’s she done, then?” he demanded, scowling down at me. Detrim had large round eyes and a pursed, thinlipped mouth above a tiny chin; he had always reminded me of a hatchetfish. Now the resemblance wasn’t funny. Hatch-etfish had long sharp teeth and plenty of them.
“She’s tossed away the needles she was supposed to take to the Bee priestess,” Adumar said. “They’re lost for good.” Detrim’s eyes got bigger and his lips drew back from his teeth. “She whatT he said in a strangled voice.
“She threw them away,” Tamzu piped up. “She threw them away, but she won’t admit it.”
“Or she lost them,” Rana suggested diffidently. No one paid her any attention.
“I didn’t,” I wailed. “Soldiers came. They chased me and the needles fell. I couldn’t go back or they’d have killed me. Foster Father, that’s what happened, please believe me—” “She’s lying,” Adumar hissed, giving me a shake. “What would soldiers be doing upriver, if they were from Kayan?”
“Where did you see them?” Detrim demanded. His sinewy brown hands were twitching. “Where were they when you ran away?”
“At the Hatch Creek ford,” I got out in a choked voice. “I was on the way to the Bee Goddess shrine. I ran downstream to get away. To the sand spit. Their boat was there.”
Detrim said slowly, “Burad and I rowed past the spit at midday. There was no boat. There were no soldiers.”
A pit had opened at my feet and I was falling into it. A buzzing filled my head and my sight darkened. Knowing I was lost, I blurted, “But they were there. You just didn’t see them, Foster Father.”
His thin lips writhed. “The needles. You lost them.”
“I—I began desperately, and then Detrim’s fist was flying toward me. I flinched and his knuckles glanced from my left cheekbone. Half stunned, I twisted in Adumar’s grip but could not break it. Detrim was roaring curses, his bunched fist drew back, and I screamed and wrenched myself aside. Detrim’s blow missed me and hit Adumar in the stomach. She lost her breath with a vast gasp, let go of my hair, and doubled over. I lunged for the doorway. Detrim seized the hem of my cloak, but it pulled from my shoulders and I half fell into the
street. Then, mindlessly, I ran toward the river. Detrim was yelling for someone to stop me, Tamzu screaming a shrill echo as they took up the chase. Some fleeting idea of jumping into a boat and shooting the rapids flashed through my mind, but Detrim was too close; I flew around a comer and ran for the woods. Women’s heads were popping out of doorways and windows. “Stop her!” Tamzu shrieked. “She’s ruined us—”
I hiLtled around a pauxa cote and without warning slammed into a man’s midriff. The man yelped. I gasped, and as I tried to collect myself, his burden of cane slid from his shoulder sling and knocked me flat on my face. Before I could scramble away, the heavy bundle had rolled across my legs, pinning me to the mud.
“Curse you, Lale,” Chefen snarled. “Watch where you’re going!”
“Hold her!” Detrim came up, spattering mud. Behind him trotted Tamzu and Rana. Stumbling after them, bent over and still fighting for breath, was Adumar. I saw my aunt’s eyes and wished I had not.
I tried to get up, but it was already too late. Chefen had been in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. He grabbed my upper arm and held me with a grip like a mooring rope. Half crushed into the dirt, all I could do was lever myself onto one elbow. A small crowd was gathering, mostly women and children. The latter stared at me wide-eyed, without a single jeer or catcall. Their silence only added to my terror. The afternoon sun had come out, and the thatch of the houses was beginning to steam.
“You, Feriti,” Adumar wheezed at a woman standing over me. “You were supposed to get the needles after the priestess. But now you won’t.”
“I won’t? Why not?”
“Because Lale lost them!” Adumar shrilled. “Everything else we’ve had to suffer, and now this! She’s a curse on us all, the litde demon. She’s been bad luck for everyone since we pulled her out of the river! Better she’d gone into the rapids!”
I saw their faces change. I’d seen them harsh before or angry or cold and indifferent, but I had never seen them become less than human. Their eyes were like the eyes of the boar we kept in the swine byre. The furies they’d stored up against one another, against the soldiers who had robbed them, against the thin soil and the bad crops and the Despot’s taxmen at last boiled over.
Feriti began it. She kicked at me almost tentatively, as if unsure of what she was doing. Then she did it again with more conviction. I moaned but no one protested, so Feriti kicked me harder. This time she hurt my ribs, and then Adumar kicked me and another woman did and then another and it hurt, it hurt a lot, and I heard someone screaming and it was me, Please I'm only eleven please please please I didn't mean to oh please but they were all screaming too.
mad, demented, and went on kicking me, kicking me until I was bleeding at the mouth, blood on my tongue hot and salt like tears, curled up now with my arms over my head so they couldn’t reach my stomach and then, oh horror, fingers clutching my hair, straightening me so they could get at my belly and my eyes, not just bare feet and fists now, but thick canes from the firewood bundle—
Shouts through the din. I was barely conscious now, but I heard the priest’s voice bellowing, Stop stop it's blasphemy. The grip on my hair vanished, and I could curl up again as the kicks and blows slowed little by little, faded away like rain diminishing. One person kept at it, two kicks at my face, the priest’s voice, Adumar leave her be I warn you. And finally it stopped, and so did I, sliding away into silence and darkness, into a place that lay deeper than the riverbed of my dreams.
Three
I was alive but seemed dead. I walked, but no one saw me. I spoke, but no one heard me.
Even the smaller children, when I held one by an arm, waited silently for me to let go. If I persisted or if I threatened anyone, an adult or an older child would intervene and remove me bodily. But they didn’t look at me or speak to me. If I went into a house, I would be picked up and put outside as if they were shifting a piece of wood. They didn’t even try to hurt me when they did it.
As for the beating, it didn’t leave any lasting damage. The Water Lord’s priest had kept me in the god’s shrine for five days, but during that time no one came to look for me. That was a relief, but I reckoned I’d have to go home eventually, and I dreaded it. I didn’t think the village was through with punishing me, and the knowledge made me feel sick and frightened. I asked the priest what was going to happen, but he refused to answer.
On the fifth day, when he saw that I could walk without a limp, he told me that I was to suffer the punishment called Negation of Being. I knew nothing of this, so the priest had to explain it. It was, he said, my penalty for lying, blasphemy, false swearing, and shegeshvai, the crime of stealing from a kinsman. Kin theft was worse than simple theft, and in places like Riversong shegeshvai was a very serious matter. Adults could have a hand cut off for it, and repeated offenses could bring death.
But, the priest went on, the Goddess of Mercy did not permit the mutilation of a child. Moreover, the Water Lord had preserved me from death when I was a baby, and if I needed killing, the god himself would arrange it. But I must be punished for my many offenses, and inflicting the Negation of Being was within the village’s rights. While I remained in Riversong, I would be allowed food enough to sustain my life, but that was all I would receive. Otherwise, as far as the village was concerned, I would cease to exist.
Then the priest fell silent. He would never speak to me again nor would anyone else; my punishment was forever. To the people of Riversong, I was as good as dead.
But for the first few days of being deceased, I thought I must have fallen into the lap of Our Lady of Mercy herself. Nobody hit me or shouted at me, and Rana put out a dish of food for me once a day. Since I couldn’t enter the house, I slept in the cooking porch, wrapping myself in my ragged cloak, which I retrieved from the midden where somebody had tossed it. When I was thirsty I drank from the butt beside the Stock House, and if I didn’t get enough food from Rana, I slipped into the breadnut plantation at night and ate some of the fallen nuts raw.
And best of all, I did not have to work. The thing that puzzled me was why more people didn’t get themselves punished by a Negation on purpose. It seemed a fine life, as long as you didn’t mind being outside all the time.
I spent much of my time at play, and several days passed very happily. Sometimes I pretended I was Vahir, the maiden in the old tale who could conjure a hat of invisibility—this was very apt, because I did seem to be invisible. Or I played at being a place god, as if I were one of the minor spirits that liked to associate themselves with particular locations: a woodland glade, an old house, a tree, a bridge, a waterfall. But nobody made the usual small sacrifices to me, so the place god game wasn’t very realistic. I liked being Vahir better.
Once I pretended I was an ancestor spirit, but it turned out rather unhappily. As everybody knows, you’re most likely to encounter one of these on your birthday, provided you call them with the proper rituals. It so happened that Feriti had her natal day shortly after I was Negated, and for revenge I decided to present myself at the end of her ritual, as if I were an ancestor, and make nasty faces at her. I hoped I'd make her scream or even faint.
It didn’t work out that way. I plastered my face and hair with white dust as a sort of ancestor disguise, then listened outside her house until she’d finished the chant and I smelled the musky offering smoke. Then I jumped up and peered through the window, with a horrible leering grimace on my face.
But she wasn’t looking at me. Instead she was on her knees, praying as fast as she could to something near the ancestor shrine. And I glimpsed it, too, as solid as Feriti was: a young man I’d never seen, wearing peculiar clothes, frowning down at her. I saw him for no more than an instant, but his presence startled me so badly I ran away and hid in the Stock House. It took me some time to get used to the fact that I’d seen an actual ancestor, even if it belonged to somebody else. It wasn’t common for people to meet such a spirit, even on their birthdays and even with the rituals, and I was a
stonished that I’d seen as much as I had. But then, after I got over my fright, I felt a wave of sadness. I didn’t know my birthday and never would, so I could never summon a spirit of my bloodline to give me advice or encouragement.
I moped over this for a day, but then tried to restore my spirits by imagining I was a different person entirely, a girl who looked like me but was someone else. This was an old game, one I’d enjoyed since I first discovered I had an imagination. Instead of drudging in poor shabby Riversong, I lived in one of the rich cities of the north. There I was no foundling, but the beloved daughter of a great and respected bloodline. My father was handsome and brave, and my mother was beautiful and wise, and they loved me very much. We lived in a big house with sunlit courtyards and a secret garden luminous with flowers. Just like the people in
Master Lim’s stories, we ate from plates of gold and drank from cups of crystal; my gowns and jackets were woven of gossamin patterned in purple and red and lilac, and my skirts rang with tiny silver bells. Everything in that world was lovely, and now I could spend as much time there as I pleased, because nobody yelled at me to stop daydreaming and get to work.
But despite such delights, after six or seven days I began to tire of having no one to talk to. Even the younger children wouldn’t acknowledge my presence, except to steal a sidelong glance at me, and finally I realized that being invisible was not as wonderful as I’d thought. Then I began to have awful nightmares, in which I tumed into a ghost and had to walk the earth instead of going to the Quiet World where I belonged.
And then I woke up one morning and realized, for the first time, what Negation really meant. It meant that I would be alone until I died.
In that instant, terror overwhelmed me. I ran through the village lanes, crying out for someone to notice my existence. Then I tried to go inside my old house. I got into the common room, where Rana sat with her face turned away. But Adumar hit me without looking at me; and Kefsen, Burad, and Tamzu silently picked me up by the arms and legs and threw me into the lane. Then they closed the door.
