Bird of Chaos: Book One of the Harpy's Curse

by Susie Mander

  “Yeah,” I said, realising the truth would complicate things.

  “Do you ever see the queen?” she said, curiosity ruffling her stony composure.

  “Sometimes.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “She’s all right,” I said hesitantly. I loved my mother but I could sense something in the girl’s tone warning me not to admit it.

  The girl laughed. “I’ve always thought she was a peacock with all them dresses and shoes. She prances around like she owns the place.” The girl put her hands on her hips like wings, stuck out her chest and pecked the air with her chin. I laughed uneasily. I knew she was just trying to be funny but I thought she was being unfair. My mother made a point of dressing discreetly, of not flaunting our wealth. She said it wasn’t proper to rub our prosperity in people’s faces. And surely prosperity wasn’t something to be ashamed of? We were born into this life. We did not choose it for ourselves. It seemed wrong that we should be condemned for something that was beyond our control.

  I said none of this. Rather, I put one hand on my forehead and another on my buttocks and scuffed my feet in the dirt. “I’m the queen and I like to eat worms,” I said, delighted when the girl laughed. It was the first time I betrayed my mother. It made me cringe with discomfort. It made me giddy with excitement.

  My father called to me. The ironmonger had finally turned his cart around and the way was clear. “I’ve got to go,” I said, turning reluctantly.

  “If you see the queen tell her I hate her.”

  “I will,” I said, waving as I ran back to the palanquin.

  The abandoned mine pit was surrounded by orange-red cliffs. Staring into the mirror-flat water was like staring into another world: a world of sky and pebbles, birds overhead and weeds wafting below. Occasionally part of the cliff crumbled and a flurry of rock bounced into the water, sending ripples across the surface, destroying the illusion.

  My father and I sat beneath an olive tree on a pebbly beach that stretched out like a lizard in the sun. He chewed on a piece of grass. “I am sorry about your mother. I know she wanted to come but she’s just so busy. And if she seems unkind, remember, it’s not her fault. Her own mother wasn’t a particularly warm woman. It is a shame she can’t be more attentive but none of us is perfect. Don’t tell her I said that.” He winked at me.

  Later, he taught me to swim. I remember firm hands around my chest. Kicking frantically. Mouth and nose full of water. Coughing. Laughing and clinging to his neck for dear life. Slowly trusting the water, and my adapted body. Afterwards, dripping beneath the olive tree, he pointed to a strangler fig. The supporting tree was dead within a woven casing of the fig’s ropy roots. “Birds deposit the seed amongst the foliage and the vine sends its roots out to envelop and smother the host tree. The fig destroys its own life source.”

  I was in awe. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realised my mother was like the strangler fig. She had surmounted Tibuta and made it her life-source. Then she had sucked it dry.

  Something had changed when we returned from the lake: there was a new severity to my mother’s expression. She waited at the top of the Walk until my father had alighted from the palanquin. “Did you have fun?” she asked. The word “fun” was an accusation. My father grunted in the affirmative but he would not look at her.

  “What did you do?” she said, following him around the litter.

  “Not much.” He held out his hand to me and I obediently took it and stepped down.

  “Jammeson?”

  He knelt to wipe invisible specs of dust from my tunic.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said.

  “Nothing.” To me he said, “Come on.” He pulled me towards the Royal Apartments.

  “Jammeson, don’t you dare walk away from me.”

  My father ignored her.

  I glanced back at my mother, who was a black smear against green grass and date palms, the jewels on her black peplos gleaming in the setting sun. I felt guilty but still I gripped my father’s sticky palm.

  Chapter two

  When I was six, my mother took me to the high priestess to be tested. A statue of the First Mother marked the start of the Holy Way, the long, perfectly straight marble concourse leading from the quay at Elea Bay all the way to the Holy Precinct. Beneath the First Mother’s mighty stone feet—each one was as big as my entire body—was the entrance to the canal, a perfectly straight elevated waterway running along the centre of the Holy Way.

  As we stepped into the water for our ablution, I waved goodbye to my father and Nanny Blan, my wet nurse from the Spice Isles.

  Nanny Blan’s eyes held the secrets of the slave pits, her back the scars of the slaver’s whip. She said the First Mother had blessed her by saving her from the mines and sending her to me but I wondered: was it a blessing that killed her husband so she would be sold into slavery? If so, I did not understand the ways of the gods.

  She spoke with an accent: “Yer highness, be good now. Don’t want no one thinking I ain’t caring for you right.”

  “Nanny Blan is right. Be good for your mother,” my father said and winked.

  My mother’s smile was strained. “She is always good for me. Aren’t you, Verne?” In truth, my mother and I were rarely alone by this time.

  I accepted my mother’s hand and stepped into the water. A thin film, like mother of pearl, covered my eyes allowing me to see in the water. Miniscule flaps of skin blocked my nose and ears. I breathed the reserves of air stored in extra air pockets in my lungs, muscle and skin tissue.

  The minstrel walked along the edge of the canal calling, “Make way!” and the war-wits practically tossed people out of the water, allowing us to swim past undisturbed. Those who could not hold their breath underwater—foreigners like fleets, quargs and the like—had to walk along the paths on either side of the canal. Beyond the paths were rocky outcrops, the occasional bony tree and, in places, knee-length wafting dry grass.

  Votive offerings and life-sized marble statues of important historic figures lined the canal. At intervals I swam to the edge to look up at them. Stopping beneath the statue of my Great-Grandmother Queen Verne Golding the Second, my mother said, “See she is holding an amphora? It is the symbol of fertility. She was very talented. She could give a woman a child simply by touching her stomach. Remember to ask her for your moonsblood. Pray to her and Amarik, goddess of fertility.”

  The midday theros sun reflected off the water and onto my mother’s face, swirling like an aurora. She was magnificent; I longed to be just like her.

  We hurried past the statue of my Grandmother Queen Ligeia the First, who sat on a throne of skulls, and did not stop to admire my aunts Tansy, Evada and Aria. She yanked me away when we reached Kratos’s statue. And there she was, Queen Ashaylah the Fifth, carved with a key around her neck like a winged angel from the Elysian Fields. Her face was captured in a moment of reverence. “You are so beautiful,” I whispered.

  “Like mother like daughter,” she said and squeezed my hand, smiling.

  “What is the key?”

  “They call me the Thief,” she said and glanced away. “Now come along.”

  As we stepped out of the canal, dripping, I was distracted by people coming and going to and from the Sacred Precinct: women who would leave their offerings at the shrine inside the temple and men and beasts who were only permitted to visit the smaller gold statue outside the precinct gate. The metallic smell of their sweat was barely hidden by the straw and marjoram strewn on the ground.

  “Remember, you are to be on your best behaviour,” my mother said for the umpteenth time.

  I did not respond. I was watching a group of Caspian sailors dressed all in red. Two of them were quargs from Forks, creatures with legs like bulls, the chest and arms of a human and a bovine head. The quargs walked a short distance from their companions to prevent their horns tangling. They joked and laughed as they went, their open mouths revealing long, thick tongues and a row of flat
discoloured teeth, perfect for eating grass.

  “You must not stare. Look ahead,” my mother said, pulling gently on my hand. Once the Caspian sailors had passed, she crossed her index fingers to make an x, the sign of the xenolith. She took my two fingers and crossed them for me. “That’s to ward off the evil of the stranger, who is a fragment of foreign rock in a pure piece of granite. Remember that. You don’t want their curse.”

  Outside the temple, the war-wits made a show of their deference, turning it into an art form, blowing on their conch shells and exaggerating each movement to the point of parody. The commoners bowed their heads in submission and allowed the war-wits to herd them out of the way.

  The gate opened onto the most glorious of all sights. It was as if the light had changed. The air was cleaner, too. I heard quiet, distant laughter and the sound of finches twittering in the trees. A series of temples rose up from the grass like ragged teeth. These were interspersed with limestone and marble monuments of our goddesses Ayfra and Shea and their daughters Icelos, goddess of death, Tia, goddess of trade, Amarik, goddess of fertility and Thera, goddess of the hunt. The goddesses were taller than any man and far more commanding.

  Men dressed in red—holy consorts or, if you are truly vulgar, sex slaves—were busy within the grounds tending garden beds of asparagus or chopping wood. One led an argutan to drink from the edge of a pond where splotches of white and pink—water lilies—floated on the murky surface. The argutan’s wide head, nuzzled between mountainous shoulders, was covered in short curly hair. Its eyes were small, its snout flat and skull thick, enabling it to lock its jaw around its target’s neck in battle. Its thin back sloped down to puny hind legs and a thick ropy tail.

  Another holy consort offered fruit to a furry black and white satryx —one of those sleek little creatures with their long fluffy tails, dark hooded eyes and long whiskers—in a bulbous tree. The satryx had wrapped its tail around a branch for balance.

  Looking back I realise the holy consorts were perfectly content. Or, if they were not—if they had ever considered what it might be like to do things for themselves rather than managing the emotions of their clients—they did not show it. Their subservience was their identity.

  We followed a glittering quartz path to the main temple, a huge gneiss pyramid that dominated the horizon. A long, broad and very steep double staircase took us to the top of the pyramid, where a sacrificial marble block stretched out in the blood orange sun. From the top of the pyramid we could see the giant headless statues of the old god and goddess Ballus and Heritia standing on the shore of Ayfra’s Inlet, their clenched fists tight against their thighs. Their huge heads, which had been toppled by my ancestors, lay half submerged on the bank. Green moss sprouted from their onyx-marble heads and a stork had made a nest in Heritia’s ear.

  My mother called out and a black cloak appeared through a row of columns. It walked with a linden staff carved in the shape of a serpent. When the cloak looked up I recognised the kind woman from the gerousia.

  “Your eminence,” my mother said, bowing.

  I kissed the woman’s ring, remembering my lesson from the Chamber of Petitions.

  The old woman sucked on her teeth. “Ah, Ashaylah, my dear. I was wondering when you would come. And here she is: the heir apparent. My little bird.” The old woman patted me on the head. “I have great hopes for you.”

  “You honour us. I have come to have her tested, if you will oblige us.”

  The high priestess indicated with her staff that we should follow and we entered a long, dark cavity. We passed column after column, our steps echoing off the stone into the cool air. “Is Jammeson well?” she said, looking over her shoulder.

  “The daroon is busy writing Tibuta’s more recent histories,” my mother said as we entered the sanctuary, which opened up like a gaping mouth.

  “A suitable pastime for a Tibutan daroon, whose only purpose is to provide lowly blood to sooth the Golding’s raging furnace. As long as you are happy.”

  I could sense my mother’s displeasure but I did not understand what I do now: that like the high priestess my mother thought my father was a satisfactory tool to balance the Golding bloodline but unlike the high priestess my mother saw him as more than water for her seed. She loved him. She probably still does, in her way.

  The black cloak dragged along the ground.

  We passed a recess at the centre of the room where three deep steps led down to a rectangular pool, its water black and oily in the gloomy light. At the centre of the pool a fire burned in a marble chalice. I stopped, mesmerised.

  “That’s the Holy Flame, Shea’s Fire,” my mother said, crouching down to watch it from my perspective. “It was lit by the First Mother and it must never go out. It is from this flame that the temple takes its power.”

  I stared in awe.

  Further along, at the very far end of the room, was the gold statue of the First Mother Ayfra. It was taller than any I had ever seen. The nude goddess stood with her right hand on her breast and her left hand holding the snake she rode to Tibuta.

  “Verne,” my mother said, gathering her cream peplos to kneel in front of the statue. I knelt beside her, removed the silk bag of natural pearls from my pocket and placed it gently in a golden offering bowl. Mimicking my mother, I closed my eyes and uttered a silent prayer for…I forgot what my mother had told me to pray for so instead asked for friends of my own. As I conversed with the gods, the smell of incense washed over me. I tried to find rayta.

  “So you intend to keep him?” Maud said as my mother pushed herself up off the ground.

  “I do.”

  “It is not common practice to let your daroon outlive his usefulness. It is written in the Book of the First Mother that he ought to be sacrificed.”

  “So it is, and yet some things must change.”

  “And if he will provide no other children?” Maud said.

  “So be it.”

  The high priestess fixed her with a dissatisfied frown. “Jammeson must give you more daughters.”

  My mother examined the old woman, shaking her head slowly. “Leave it be. I have not come to discuss my daroon.”

  “You do love your daughter? Surely another would be a blessing.”

  “Of course I love her, but…you must understand the position I am in. A child is…is a blessing. But it is also a…a burden, a threat…to my time.”

  Maud knitted her brows. “But surely—”

  “Don’t push me,” my mother said with the firmness of someone who is sure of her position. “One is enough. I had her”—she nodded at me—“for Jammeson’s sake. And because you insisted. If I had my way there would be no need…the point is you have your heir. I have done my duty.” Her eyes were cold. “Now, will you test her or not?”

  “If you only gave me a moment to explain myself you would understand that my desire for you and Jammeson—”

  “Save your lectures.”

  The high priestess laughed. It was a throaty, uneasy sound. “If you came more often, perhaps there would be less to lecture you about. Or at least I could spread the lecture out over many days.”

  A painful silence hung in the air and I looked between the two women, wishing one of them would end this farce. Finally, my mother softened. She laughed a capriccio. “This is folly. Let us leave our differences aside and focus on my daughter. Please. I must know.”

  The high priestess seemed to contemplate further argument then chose the way of peace. “Follow me.”

  We passed through the sanctuary down a dark tunnel with a low ceiling and turned abruptly through an archway to the high priestess’s private study, which was lit by a single torch in a sconce in the wall. The smell of dust and mould from the scrolls was not unpleasant but comforting. I noticed a low table cluttered with instruments of torture that filled me with sick fascination: bronze scalpels, hooks and bone drills. I longed to run the blades against my thumb and see how hard I had to push before they pierced my skin. Death, at
this age, was still only a vague concept, something I knew I should fear judging by my father’s reaction whenever I tripped but also something I could not comprehend. To appreciate death requires a full understanding of “self”, the ability to distinguish it from others, and this was something I had not yet attained.

  My mother sat in a low chair opposite the high priestess with her ankles crossed. “Verne, dear, come here,” Maud said.

  I did so reluctantly. Maud put her staff to the side, took my face between two bony hands and tipped my chin so my face caught the light from a hole in the ceiling. She turned my face this way and that like a merchant inspecting a piece of pottery, checking for imperfections before committing to a purchase. “There are no signs of any taint. Her skin is clear of the pox, which you can be glad of.” Then to me, she said, “Show me your feet.” So I kicked off my sandals and held my webbed toes out for inspection. “See, Ashaylah, like Evada she has the mark, which is written in the second appendix.”

  “And yet the third appendix speaks of a bird and yet no bird has come. What do you make of that?”

  Maud ignored this and said to me, “Will you take off your clothes?”

  Without hesitation, I took the shawl off, folding it and placing it on the corner of the desk. I looked down at my soft, pink body—like a boy’s body, with little sign of any difference except for the gentle hill between my legs.

  “Now, dear, get up on the examination table,” the high priestess said.

  I climbed up and lay on the bench as still as a corpse.

  Perhaps this is what it is like when you die? I remember thinking. I had seen the hoplites killed in battle laid out in the market place before their dismemberment. It was like they were sleeping.

  “Am I going to die?” I asked and my mother laughed softly.

  “No, of course not. I would never let any harm come to you.” She took my hand. “Be brave. I’m here.”