by Kate Elliott
“Yah yah!” yelled the old woman at the loiterers.
Folk abandoned the open space. Only the old merchant, the headwoman, and a trio of cousins remained. The women in their embroidered caps and bright silks looked very much alike with broad faces and reddish-clay complexions.
“Are you human, or demon?” Kirya asked.
The old woman grabbed her hands, clucking over the sores on her wrists as she scolded the old man in a withering harangue which he ended by throwing up his hands and walking away. This impertinence toward the headwoman passed without comment. Kirya found herself led to a long wooden tent with a narrow door guarded by two men holding staffs and barred by wooden beams that must be shifted before the door could be opened.
Inside was a confusing mash of walls, women, cloth, and doors, and beyond it a space surrounded by a high wall. Girls and young women pressed forward to touch her as she was led through their ranks into a place with a pair of vast copper tubs. Now, again, she must strip and bathe, only this time twenty or more females, mostly young but some old, sat on or stood behind benches and stared with eyes wide and whispered comments but not a breath of laughter. The tub soon muddied, and she stepped out to stand dripping on cold tiles. A child brought a cloth, and she dried herself. The old woman fanned herself on a stool as she examined Kirya with the implacable gaze of a headwoman who considers the impact of a stranger come into her tribe.
She gestured. A girl hurried forward to collect Kirya’s discarded clothing. Kirya grabbed for it, but the old woman slapped her on the wrists with a quirt—right where the sores made them most raw—and Kirya yelped and withdrew her hands as she was left naked.
A girl brought perfumed soap, and indicated the other tub, filled with clean water. While Kirya washed herself again, and washed the grime out of her hair, the old woman searched through the soft leather pouch that held Kirya’s mirror, her comb, her cup and spoon, and the beaded nets Mariya had given her. The old woman handled these things and set them aside as of no value. No doubt she could not respect a woman without bow and knife.
Silks were brought, and their colors held up against Kirya’s body, and comments made—yes or no by the swaying of heads and clatter of hands and excited whispers. They dressed her in silk of unspeakable softness, underclothing so smooth it seemed to have the weight of a cloud; loose trousers and a knee-length overtunic slit for walking in a cloth the color of the sky before dawn, more gray than pink. The old woman brushed a gooey salve onto the sores that circled her wrists. It stung, but then the spicy scent relaxed her. The old woman gestured to show she must sit on a stool with arms extended, so the salve could dry.
Giggling, three girls approached her. One had black hair and black eyes, one brown hair and brown eyes, and one hair streaked with a reddish-brown color that matched her complexion.
“Mima. Mima,” said the black haired girl, tapping her chest. She pointed to the others. “Ebba. Ebba. Noria. Noria.” Then she pointed to Kirya. “Yah? Yah?”
Kirya knew better than to give her name to demons.
Mima smiled kindly. “Yah yah yah,” she added. She displayed a metal comb and mimed combing hair.
Behind, the other young women and girls hissed and hooted, or coughed and sneered. Several girls just sat there staring blindly at nothing, and one girl rocked obsessively side to side, but she sat away by herself, no one close by her. Yet none of them left. They wanted to watch as when, the only other time Kirya had seen a foreign person in the tribes, all the children had followed the foreign person around the entire time that person had walked within camp.
Kirya shrugged, to show acquiescence. Anyway, Mima’s pretty smile reminded her of Mariya. Was it so bad to want a person to be friendly with, even if it was a demon?
Hesitantly, Mima reached for Kirya’s hair, but withdrew her hand without touching it. The old woman snapped out words. Mima fixed a nervous smile on her face, and tapped the hair as if it might burn her. Her companions squealed, and giggled, and Kirya grinned, just a little, because they were so funny.
“Yah yah yah,” said Mima with a giggle. She began to work through the long tangles. As she worked, the place quieted while every soul there, except for the girl who rocked side to side, watched and exclaimed as if they expected the color to change with every stroke, only of course it did not.
They were dark, some like Mima handsome in the manner of Mariya and some demon-scratched like the Qin, while others had a clay-red complexion or a pleasing brown one, and one pair of girls had skin so black that Kirya wondered if the color had been painted on. But no one else was like her, a woman of the tribes with pale hair and pale skin.
A low clang shivered through the air. The old woman clapped her hands, and the girls and young women hurried away, some gabbling but most silent. Several girls lifted up and then pushed along the girl who had been rocking side to side; she was like a sleepwalker.
The attendants closed in on either side of Kirya, gripped her elbows. They steered her down a long narrow place fenced by high walls and a roof, and into a big place, like a headwoman’s spacious tent, only this tent with its unmoving walls had benches set on a raised platform and other places to sit heaped with pillows. Lamps hissed. A sharp perfume smoking up from piles of incense made her eyes water and her nostrils sting.
They sat her on a stool on the platform. An attendant tucked a startlingly beautiful white flower between Kirya’s hair and ear. In twos and fours, the other girls and young women filed into the room, some with eyes cast down and shoulders hunched and others with bold, hard laughter and snatches of song. So much bright silk dazzled Kirya. This was a rich tribe, indeed, that all its daughters and even a servant like herself were dressed in precious cloth.
Wood clappers snapped out a staccato rhythm. A pair of older women pulled back the purple curtains to reveal doors. A pair of stocky men armed with staffs came out of the shadows and opened the doors. Twilight swirled in on a dusty breeze, and on its wings tramped a horde of jabbering men who, as they settled inside, fell quiet suddenly and stared at her so brazenly that after all they were not proper men who knew better than to stare but must be demons, even if they looked mostly like men.
There came the old merchant from the journey, and the young one flushed and drunk in his wake, scratching at his groin again, that itch having come back. What animals they were!
The old woman strode to the dais and gave a lengthy speech which every man there followed with avid attention. Then she raised a hand. At once they began shouting at her and shaking pouches at her, one overtopping the next. The young merchant cursed in a loud voice and stormed out; the old merchant faded to the back to watch. The clamor looked a lot like haggling at a confluence when one tribe was trying to get more hides or saddle blankets in exchange for dyestuffs or a particular stud.
A shout of triumph from one of the men. A groan from the others, and suppressed if intense whispering among the girls as the triumphant man strutted forward and dropped a heavy bag at the old woman’s feet. An attendant counted out bars of silver from the bag he’d tossed down.
The behavior of demons made no sense at all, so Kirya was relieved when the attendants pulled on her elbows and made it known she could get out of that unpleasant, crowded place and go away into a different one. They led her past a curtain into a cave of tiny places like narrow cages with high walls. They pressed her into one of these narrow places. A lamp burned on either side, hanging from the low ceiling. She stood on a strip of worn carpet, nothing special; she’d felted better patterns as a little girl. A cot set against one wall filled half the space.
The attendants backed out, and the man who had thrown down the bag of silver bars sauntered in, grinning. He was a burly, middle-aged fellow dressed in a silk robe belted with a polished gold buckle. A curtain slipped down behind him, cutting them off from everywhere else. They were alone.
“Whew!” he said in a friendly way. He plucked the flower from her ear.
Abruptly, it all made sense.
He thought she was offering him her Flower Night.
“No!” She took a step back. “You are not my choice!”
He laughed. “Yah yah yah,” he said jovially as he walked to her, driving her back until she bumped into the wall and could retreat no farther. His heavy hands settled on her shoulders. He fumbled at her hair, bringing strands to his face, closing his eyes, and taking in a breath. She wedged her arms up between them, and shoved.
“Oof! Heh!” He stumbled back a few steps. He chuckled at first, but then he frowned, and then he furrowed his brow, and then he called out in an annoyed tone.
The old woman appeared, mouth pressed tight.
“Yah yah yah,” he complained, gesturing and grimacing.
She grunted, went out past the curtain, and returned with a quirt in her hand. This she raised threateningly. For that first instant, Kirya was so greatly relieved that the headwoman of the tribe had come to teach this outrageously behaved man some manners. As if he could just walk in and demand her Flower Night, when it was hers to offer, not his to take!
The quirt whipped down onto her forearms. She yelped, more angry than hurt. Again, it slapped down, and this time she kicked out to defend herself. Her foot met flesh, and the old woman shrieked. The quirt thwacked into the side of Kirya’s head, staggering her. The man was scolding in a loud voice as shouts and questions flew from outside, and the quirt slapped into her calves so hard Kirya fell. She hit, hard, on her back, breath punched out of her lungs, dazed and dizzy and utterly confused.
He was taking his clothes off.
She struggled to sit, but the quirt slapped her down again, and this time she shouted with rage, coming up fighting. Attendants swarmed in, bound her raw and aching wrists and her ankles with rope, and tied her to the cot, and then they departed, not even angry about her kicking and punching, as if tying down a screaming, struggling girl who was about to be forced against her will was something they were accustomed to doing every day.
After that, there was nothing she could do to stop him. Or the next one. Or the next one. Or the next one.
26
The long night begins.
It is not night always. She counts the days and polishes her mirror. She accepts a name, Azalea, a white flower. She might laugh with Mima and Ebba and Noria over a joke as they are scrubbing floors, or during a song they are teaching her while they grind kernels to flour in big stone bowls, or when she makes a mistake speaking a word, saying “I comb my chair” instead of “I comb my hair.” She might sit on a bench with her friends in the shade of a tree and drowse in afternoon’s lazy heat. She might appreciate the melting sweetness of fruit in her mouth. She might close her eyes with the pleasure of perfumed soap and warmed water coursing down her skin.
But after the twilight bell she pretends her body does not exist. The customers don’t like her to close her eyes. She gets whipped for that. If her eyes are closed, then it’s like she is dead, a pale corpse, and while there are a few demons who might like to imagine they are rutting into the empty shell of a corpse, mostly they imagine other things and those other things mean she has to keep her eyes open to show she is alive.
But that doesn’t mean she has to see. After long enough, she can be blind with her eyes open.
ONE MORNING, SIX months into her servitude, they woke to discover that the girl who rocked side to side and never spoke had thrown herself into the well and drowned.
Twenty-three days after that, Ebba stabbed with an embroidery needle one particular customer who was trying to do something to her the old woman would not speak of afterward, and as the days passed the bleeding from her flower wouldn’t stop and turned into a horrible infection that killed her.
Fourteen days after the dead girl was hauled out of the compound to be thrown into the waste pits, eight of the girls got a flux, maybe from eating tainted meat, and five died after days of agonizing cramps.
The best-earning girl, after Kirya, got pregnant, and died from a bad batch of purgative.
The next day, the old woman took Kirya to the market and sold her to one of the masters of a passing caravan, handing over the girl, the mirror, and the beaded nets.
“Bad ghost,” she said, in a rare moment of honest assessment. “Demon eyes unlucky.”
But the men could not take their eyes off her pale hair and pale skin and blue eyes. They had a long journey to make, many months traveling east on the Golden Road across the Qin pastures and farther east still through the fabled wastelands of the bone desert. It was good in such circumstances to have entertainment and, really, you could do anything you wanted to a demon because it wasn’t human.
WHEN SHE TRIED to run away, the guards caught her, and after they were done with her, the master whipped her, and after he was done with her, he chained her to the whores’ wagon so she couldn’t run.
SHE LOST COUNT of the days.
ONE OF THE guards took her mirror and gave it to another of the caravan whores, and when she tried to get it back, the master whipped her.
WITHOUT HER WOMAN’S mirror to show what is truth and what illusion, she might as well be dead, her shell an empty vessel that imitates the motions of life. Maybe it is better that way. Maybe everything that came before was the dream, and she is after all a demon and the ones who torment her are human, just as they say they are.
THE CARAVAN WAS plagued with bad luck. Dead birds littered the path they followed. A way station where they usually picked up water and supplies had been abandoned. A guard crawled away into the night, raving, and was never seen again. A water hole known as safe proved to be tainted, and everyone got sick with a flux that felled a number of sheep and three grooms and left the rest trembling and weak. Which was a respite for her.
A company of Qin soldiers clattered past, in a hurry to get to the border on some military errand, so they only stole what they could easily carry on their horses—wool thread, vials of western spice, saddle blankets, silver bars—but when they ripped open the canvas entrance to the whores’ wagon and saw her, they made warding signs, hurried back to their horses, and cantered off as if fleeing from an approaching storm.
Which hit several days later.
The sandstorm raged for an eternity. When they dug themselves out, two wagons and a pair of dray beasts had vanished beneath the shrieking winds and blowing sands, and four drovers trapped in shelter without water had died of thirst.
Outside her wagon, the master said, “We sell the demon in the next town. The old bitch spoke true: Demon eyes bring bad luck. So, take your turn now if you still want.”
THE NEXT FIVE days were the worst she had endured even after everything that had come before.
IN THE TOWN, the master took the precaution of bribing a priest to certify her as human even though everyone in the caravan knew she was the demon who had called down the storm and poisoned the spring. Then he sold her in a private auction.
Before he handed her over to her new master, he slapped her, and said, “Now I hope you will suffer as you made us suffer.”
HER NEW MASTER examined her with the ugly lust she had come to recognize in male faces, but he did not touch her even after the merchant collected his coin and departed. He made her hide her hair and face under a draped cloth, and led her out of the private room in the merchant’s hostel into a courtyard where two other persons fell into step beside him as they crossed under the hostel gate and out into the town.
“For Girish?” asked one.
“For Girish. Better a slave than a wife.”
“Yes, Brother. Girish cannot be allowed a wife.”
She was surprised, because they spoke the same kind of demon speech Mima had taught her. It was the speech all the merchants and guards knew, but in the towns, people usually used other words if they weren’t speaking to the merchants.
She walked three paces behind them through the confusing babble of what she now knew was called a street. This one stank as usual but besides that twisted and turned and changed direction, yet since
she kept her face shrouded and her gaze fixed on his feet, she saw nothing except the red-clay earth on which they walked, the well-made leather sandals he wore, and the occasional piles of steaming manure from dray beasts which they must avoid. The person he conversed with had soft, dark feet encased in good leather sandals. The third person, with big hairy callused bare feet, remained silent.
Once the master paused to talk to another man, making elaborate greetings in babble words but afterward slipping into the speech she could understand.
“A good harvest, eh, Master Firah? We drink plenty of wine next year from your grapes.”
“If we have any wine to drink! What think you about the meeting with the Qin commander? I like not the new regulations, and the high tax. What think you, Master Mei?”
“I think we obey, or the Qin kill us. For me, an easy choice. For you, a different choice?”
“Heh heh, no, not at all. Just talking.”
“My brother Hari got arrested and taken away for ‘just talking.’ ”
“Sorry to speak of it. My apologies, Master Mei, for reminding you of your family’s ill fortune. Any news of your daughter, eh? I hear talk from my wife that maybe now the girl is old enough, a marriage may be arranged. We have a good, strong son, sure to inherit the business. If you are interested, come talk.”
The master grunted irritably. “I do not speak of my daughters out on the street.”
“My apologies. My apologies.”
They walked on.
The sandaled companion said, “Brother, Firah has much coin and a good vineyard.”
“Not for my orchid.”
“True. True. We can do better for her.”
“She is too young for marriage!”
“Heh, Brother! She is old enough, fifteen now. Plenty old. And maybe we can offer that teakettle as part of the bargain.”
