Cinnabar Shadows

by Lynn Abbey

  The dignitaries she met at the high templar gatherings were fascinated by her skin—as they were fascinated by anything exotic. They handled her constantly, sometimes with ardent gentleness, sometimes not.

  The reasons for their fascination were unimportant to Mahtra, so long as they gave her something when they were finished. Coins were best; coins had so many uses. She could take them to the market and exchange them for food, fuel, clothing, or anything else Father and the other waterside dwellers needed. Jewels were almost as useful; they could be turned into coins in the elven market. Sometimes, though, her nighttime consorts gave Mahtra things she kept for herself, like the long, black shawl she wore this chilly morning.

  A human merchant had given Mahtra the shawl at one of the first high templar gatherings she'd attended. He said the forest-weavers of Gulg had woven it from song-spider silk. He said she should wear it to conceal her delicate white-white skin—and the dark mottled blotches he'd made on it. She obeyed without argument. Obedience was so much easier than argument when she was still so new and the world, so old.

  Father had sucked on his teeth when she handed him the shawl. Burn it or sell it, he said, throwing it on the damp, stony shores of the water; there were better ways to live above ground, if that was where she was determined to live. But Father couldn't tell her how to live those better ways, any more than he could explain the difference between made and born.

  So Mahtra disobeyed him, then, and kept the shawl as a treasure. It warmed her as she walked between the hut and the high templar residences and it was softer than anything she'd felt before or since. She didn't think about the merchant; neither he nor the mottled blotches mattered enough to remember. Her skin always turned white again, no matter how dark a night's handling left it.

  And the shawl would hide her no matter what color her skin was.

  Hiding; hiding was why Mahtra kept the shawl pulled tight around her. The stares of folk who were only slightly different from each other hurt far more than the hands that touched her at the high templar gatherings. Children who looked up from their street games to shout "Freak," or "Spook," or "Show us your face!" hurt most of all, because they were as new as she was. But children were born; they could hate, despise, and scorn. She was made; she was different.

  Mahtra clung to her shawl and the shadows until she reached yesterday's market. Early-rising folk and nightfolk like herself were dependent on the enterprising merchants of yesterday's markets: collections of carts that appeared each sunrise near Urik's most heavily trafficked intersections. Yesterday's markets served those who couldn't wait until the city gates opened and the daily flood of farmers and artisans surged through the streets to the square plazas where they set up their stalls and sold their wares. The vendors of yesterday's markets lived in the twilight and dawn, buying the dregs of one day's market to sell before the next day's got under way.

  Yesterday's markets were very informal, completely illegal, and tolerated by Lord Hamanu because they were absolutely necessary to his city's welfare. And as with all other things that endured in Urik, yesterday's markets had become traditional. The half-elf vendor who laid claim to the choice northwestern corner where the Lion's Way crossed Joiners' Row sold only yesterday's fruit, as his father had sold only such fruit from the cart he wheeled each dawn to that precise location, and as his children would when their turn came. His customers, sleepy-headed at either the start or finish of their day's work, relied on his constancy and he, in turn, knew them, as well as strangers dared to know each other in Urik.

  "Cabras, eleganta," he said with a smile and a gesture toward four of the husky, dun-colored spheres. "Almost fresh from the Dolphiles estate. First of this year's crop, and the best. A bit each, two bits for the lot."

  The fruitseller talked constantly, without expecting an answer, which Mahtra appreciated, and he called her eleganta, which Father said was a polite word for improper activities, but she liked the sound of it. Mahtra liked cabras, too, though she had almost forgotten them. Seeing them now on the fruitseller's cart, she remembered that she hadn't seen them for a great many mornings. For a year's worth of mornings, according to the half-elf.

  Years and crops confused Mahtra. Her life was made up of days and nights, strings of dark beads following light beads, with no other variations. Others spoke of weeks and years, of growing up and growing old. They spoke of growing crops, of planting and harvesting. She'd been clever enough to piece together the notion that food wasn't made in the carts of yesterday's market; food was born somewhere outside the city walls. But growing was a more difficult concept for someone who hadn't been born, hadn't been a child, couldn't remember being anything except exactly what she was.

  Staring at the cabras, Mahtra felt her differences—her made-ness and her newness—as if she were standing in an empty cavern and her life were a meager collection of memories strewn in a spiral at her feet.

  When she concentrated, Mahtra found six cabra-places among her memories. Six cabra-years, then, since wherever cabras were born, wherever they grew, they appeared on the fruitseller's cart just once a year. That made six years since she'd found herself in Urik and memories began, because the sixth cabra-place, all bright red and cool, sweet nectar flowing down her throat, was very near the beginning of the spiral. She'd have to make a new cabra-place in her memory today, the seventh cabra-place. She'd been in Urik, living in a hide-and-bone hut beside underground water, for seven years.

  Changing her hold on her shawl, Mahtra thrust her hand into the morning. She extended one long, slender finger tipped with a dark-red, long, sharp fingernail.

  "Only one, eleganta? What about the rest? Share them with your sisters—"

  Mahtra shook her head vigorously. She had no sisters, no family at all, except for Father, who said the sweet cabra nectar hurt his old teeth. There was the dwarf, Mika, who shared the hide-and-bone hut. Like her, Mika had no family, but Mika's family had died in a fire and Father had taken Mika in, because he'd been born. He was "young," Father said, not new, and without family he couldn't take care of himself.

  Mika had arrived since the last cabra-place. Mahtra didn't know if he liked sweet fruit.

  She extended a second slender finger.

  "Wise, eleganta, very wise. Let me have your sack—"

  She retrieved a wad of knotted string from the sleeve of her gown. The fruitseller shook it out while Mahtra sorted two ceramic bits out of her coin-pouch. By the time she had them, the half-elf was stuffing the fourth cabra into the back. Mahtra didn't want the other fruits, but he didn't notice when she shook her head. She considered reaching across the cart to get his attention by touching his hand; Father said strangers didn't touch each other, unless they were children, and she—despite her newness—wasn't a child. Grown folk got each other's attention with words.

  With one hand deathgripped on her shawl and the other clutching her two ceramic bits, Mahtra used her voice to say: "Not four, only two."

  "Eh, eleganta? I don't understand you. Take off your mask."

  Mahtra recoiled. She let go of the ceramic bits and snatched her string-sack, four cabra fruits and all.

  "Eleganta...?"

  But Mahtra was gone, running toward the elven market with her chin tucked down and the shawl pulled forward.

  She took off the mask only in the hide-and-bone hut, where Father knew all her secrets, and in the high templar residences, but no where else. Though the mask wasn't a part of her, like the burnished marks on her face and shoulders, she'd been wearing it when her awareness began. Her makers had made the mask to hide their mistakes. That was what Father said when he examined its carefully wrought parts of leather and metal... when he'd looked at the face her makers had wanted to keep hidden. It wasn't the mask that made Mahtra's words difficult to understand; it was the makers. She'd collapsed the first time she saw her face in a silver mirror—the only time she'd lost her consciousness. Then she smashed the mirror and cursed her nameless, faceless makers: they'd forgotten
her nose. Two red-rimmed counter-curving slashes reached down from the bony ridge between her eyes. The slashes ended above a mouth that was equally malformed. Mahtra's lips were thin and scarcely flexible. Her jaw was too narrow for the soft, flexible tongue that other sentient races used to shape their words. The tongue the makers had given her, like the. fine scales on her white skin, might have come from a lizard.

  The elven market was a world unto itself inside Lord Hamanu's city. It had its own walls built against the city walls and its own gate opening into Urik-proper. A gang of templars stood watch at the gate where the doors were thick and tall and their hinges were corroded from disuse. Why the templars watched and what they were looking for was a mystery. They challenged folk sometimes as they entered or left, letting the lucky pass and leading the unlucky away, unless they executed them on the spot, but they never challenged her, even when she approached the gate at a panic! run.

  Maybe they knew who she was—or where she spent her nights. Maybe she was too different, even for them. They let her pass between them and through the gaping gates without comment this morning as they had every other morning.

  Unlike the other markets of Urik, the elven market wasn't a gathering of farmers and vendors who arrived in an empty plaza, hawked their wares, and then disappeared. The elven market wasn't a market at all, but a separate city, the original Urik, older than the Dragon or the sorcerer-kings, older than the barren Tablelands that now surrounded the much larger city. Lord Hamanu's power was rightly feared in the elven market, but his laws were largely ignored and could be ignored because the unwritten laws of this ancient quarter were every bit as brutally efficient.

  Enforcers had carved the mazelike market into a precinct patchwork through which strangers might wander unaware that every step they took, every bargain, every sidelong glance or snicker was watched and, if necessary, remembered. The market residents were watched by the same network, and paid dearly for the privilege. In return, those who dwelt within the old walls of the elven market, where the Lion-King's yellow-robed templars feared to travel in gangs of less than six, were assured of protection from everyone except their protector.

  Mahtra was neither a stranger nor a resident. She paid several enforcers for the privilege of walking through the precinct maze early each morning when the market was as close to quiet as it ever got. Having paid for her safe passage, Mahtra was careful never to deviate from her permitted path, lest the eyes that always watched from rooftops, alleyways, and shadowed, half-open doors report her missteps to the enforcers.

  Once, when she was much newer than she was now, curiosity had lured Mahtra off the paid-for path. She meant no harm, but the enforcers didn't believe—or couldn't understand—her mute protestations. They'd sent their bully-boy runners after her, and they'd learned the hard way that Mahtra would protect herself. She couldn't be harmed, except at great cost in lives and the greater risk of drawing Lord Hamanu's attention down to their little domains.

  That long-ago morning, when she was very new and didn't understand what was important, Mahtra said nothing to Father when she returned to the cavern, nor anything when she went out at dusk. But when she returned the next morning, five corpses, all tortured and mutilated, lay in the chamber at the head of the elven market passage to the cavern. The enforcers had decided that others—born-folk without her ability to take care of themselves—would pay the price of her indiscretions.

  Men and women with weapons in hand were waiting for her in the cavern, demanding justice, demanding retribution. Mahtra prepared to defend herself, but Father told her no, and faced the angry mob himself. She heard herself called terrible things that day, but Father prevailed, and the mob dispersed.

  When they returned to the hide-and-bone hut, Father took her wrists firmly in his hands and said cavern children were allowed one mistake, no matter how serious, and that he'd persuaded the others that she should be granted the same grace, because being new was like being a child. Then, holding her wrists tight enough to hurt, Father said she must concern herself with the born-folk who were their neighbors along the shore of the underground water. She must not endanger the whole community with her curiosity; she must stick to the path she'd paid for, else he himself would be the one to banish her and nothing her makers had given her would protect her from his wrath. Father had come into Mahtra's mind then, as a warning, not as her mentor. His face was more terrible than her own and there was a horror he named death burning in his eyes. She was powerless before him. She learned a meaning of fear and had stayed on the paid-for path.

  "Mahtra! Mahtra!" a woman called from behind, a dwarf by the deep pitch of her voice and, considering where Mahtra was on her path, most likely Gomer, a trader who specialized in beads and amulets.

  Mahtra stopped and turned. Gomer flashed a smile and beckoned her. With a glance at the rooftops, alleys and the other places where her invisible escort might be lurking, Mahtra backtracked to the dwarf. Gomer sold her goods from the inside a boxlike stall along Mahtra's paid-for path. The enforcers wouldn't object—not if she saved a bit or two for the runner who'd surely show up, demanding a share of Gomer's trade, before Mahtra left this precinct.

  "What've you got in your sack? Got yourself some cabras, eh?" Gomer knew Mahtra didn't talk much; she didn't waste precious time pausing between questions. "So they're starting to show up in the markets? Have to go out and get me some, maybe. Unless we could make a bargain, you and I. That's a lot of fruit you've got there. Make you sick, it would—even you. But I've got something here you'd like better than cabra—cinnabar!"

  Gomer's meaty, powerful hand wove delicately over the compartmented trays set out on her selling board. She plucked up a carved bead about the size of her thumb's knuckle and the same color as Mahtra's fingernails. The sight of it made Mahtra's mouth water. She liked cabra fruit, but she craved the bitter-tasting beads carved from red cinnabar.

  "Thought you'd want it, dearie," Gomer chuckled.

  She closed her fingers over the bead, shook her hand and blew across it, as if she were casting dice in a high-stakes game, and then opened her fist one finger at a time. To Mahtra's dismay, the bead had vanished.

  "You do want it, don't you?"

  Mahtra nodded vigorously. The dwarf chuckled again. She made extravagant motions with her hand, and when she showed her palm again, there were three red beads nestled among the calluses.

  "I should charge you a silver, that's what they're worth, you know—especially since you won't resell them—but give me two of your cabras and I'll let you have them for a half-disk."

  Mahtra would have made a bad bargain to acquire the beads, but Gomer's offer was ideal. She fished the extra fruits out of her sack and five ceramic bits out of her coin-pouch. Gomer dribbled the beads into her hand. They were pretty little things, with leaves and flowers carved all over two of them and a strange animal she'd never seen before carved in the third. But it was the cinnabar itself that excited her. Her hand began to warm as soon as the red beads touched it.

  "Have fun, dearie," Gomer said.

  The dwarf balanced one of the husky fruits against her thigh and smashed it open with a blow from her fist. Red juice sprayed her tunic, looking for a heartbeat like blood. Mahtra didn't like blood; it was something old and deep within her, from beyond the spirals of her memory. An inner voice told her to run, and she did, though she knew the splatters were only sweet cabra juice.

  A runner appeared a bit farther on. He was a human youth, sleek and well-muscled, typical of the well-fed bullies who worked for the market enforcers. He stopped her. There was an obsidian knife in his hand and an arrogant jut to his jaw, but he kept his distance as he said:

  "For luck, Mahtra," and held out his hand. "Give me some of what you bought."

  She'd have paid him however many ceramic bits he wanted, or gone off with him to whatever bolthole he called home, but she wouldn't surrender her cinnabar beads. She tried to make her refusal plain, but the youth couldn't understand her gest
ures—or perhaps that was only his own stubborn refusal.

  "Give me half," he demanded, "or I'll tell Map."

  Another sturdy human, Map was the local enforcer and a man with a temper to be avoided. Mahtra thought of the butchered corpses in the antechamber years ago and of the three beads in her hand right now. Three wasn't a number that could be easily divided in half. Although she and the runner stood in an intersection, Mahtra felt as if she were trapped in a corner. Juggling the loose beads and the heavy string sack with one hand, she fumbled through her coin-pouch with the other and fished out a shiny silver coin.

  The bully frowned. "I want what you bought from Gomer. She's making special bargains for you. Map's gonna want to know about it."

  That was too much threat, too much confusion, for Mahtra to bear. She felt trapped, she felt angry, and the burnished scars on her shoulders began to grow warm beneath her shawl. Stiffness spread down her arms, down her spine all the way to her feet; she couldn't move. The scars around her eyes burned as well, and a cloudy membrane slipped across her vision while the makers' precautions protected her.

  Mahtra's scars were burning; her vision was blurred. She felt the silver coin yanked out of her fingertips and heard hard pounding as the bully ran away, but it was several more heartbeats before the membranes withdrew, her limbs relaxed and she could move again.

  She hadn't actually done anything wrong, but Father would be angry—very angry. He might not believe it wasn't her fault, even when he could look inside her mind where the truth was marked into her memory. Fear emerged from its lonely corner, haunting her thoughts as she continued through the market maze.