“Zamatryna, where is my brother? Where is my sister? Jamfret! Poliniana! Where are you?”
“I hear them,” Zamatryna said. She wasn’t sure she did, but she didn’t want Rikko to be more afraid. “We’re all here, I’m sure we are, we’ll find each other, don’t be scared.”
“Family, move to the side,” someone called. Was that Timbor? It had to be someone from her family, because she understood the words. “Wait until we are all together again!”
So the children stopped, while the other bodies flowed around them, until finally they were gathered once more as a family. Macsofo had lost or cast aside one of his bundles so that he could support Aliniana, who seemed to be in a swoon. Darroti had put down his own bundles and stood hugging himself, his face clenched. Everyone else was pale but unhurt. “Well,” Timbor said drily, “at least we know that there are other people here.”
“I cannot breathe,” Aliniana said, clawing at her husband’s shoulder. “I cannot breathe, I cannot—”
“You can,” Macsofo said. “You are. You’re breathing, or you couldn’t speak. Breathe more slowly, Alini, so you do not faint.”
Zamatryna looked around. In front of her, going through a gate in an ugly fence made of thick metal wire, were the jostling people among whom they had arrived. Through the fence she could see low, dreary buildings made of wood and cloth. Behind her, from the direction in which they’d been walking, she saw very strange buildings, high and square, sitting on four round wheels. Were they carts? But they were metal, except for their roofs, which were dull green cloth stretched over poles. They looked so heavy, and there were no horses or people to pull them. Now she saw that each one had a tiny house with a door and windows attached to the front of it.
She didn’t understand these carts. What kind of land was this? She looked down and saw herself standing on hard dirt, light brown and dusty. Nothing grew where she stood, although in the distance she could see low green bushes. There were no flowers anywhere. On the horizon were mountains, brown and rolling; some of the farther ones were blue, capped with white. But there were no trees, and everything was flat for a long, long way—for huge distances on either side, spaces that could have held ten, twenty, a hundred Plazas of Judges—until the mountains began far off. The mountains shimmered in the parching, brutal heat of this place, much as the door into exile had shimmered on the Plaza.
Suddenly there was a grinding, bellowing noise; they all jumped, and Zamatryna grabbed her mother’s hand. One of the strange carts with the little house attached to it was moving, going away from them much faster than a person could walk. Stinking smoke came from the back of it. They all stared. “How does it do that?” Rikko said. “Nothing is pulling it. Is it alive?”
“It looks like a built thing,” Erolorit said, frowning.
“It’s ugly.” Poliniana was very definite. “I don’t like this place. I want to go home.”
“Hush,” Macsofo said, and knelt down to hug her. “We can’t go home. This is home now.”
“Hay hay yoo hall owe ear? Hay!” Someone was calling from the ugly gate; they turned and looked. Two people were waving and pointing at them, and one was also speaking. “Yoo thair. Whoo air yoo? Whitzer naemez?”
They stared. They had no idea what the person was saying. They stood and blinked, until finally the person left the gate and trudged toward them. “Is he ill?” Harani said. “What’s the matter with his skin?”
“The other one is like that too,” Timbor said, and indeed, both of these new people had the ugliest skin Zamatryna had ever seen, pale pink and blotchy. The man walking toward them wore green clothing, the same color as the covering of the grinding cart that had just gone away. His hair was the color of carrots. He carried a piece of wood with a piece of paper held to it with a small metal bar. He came within a few feet of them and then stopped.
“Hall owe,” he said. He was smiling. “Will come.” He looked at Zamatryna and knelt on the ground. “High let oil gull,” he said. Zamatryna saw that his eyes were the precise blue of the sky, and her own widened in wonder. “Hoo air yoo fokes?”
“I’m sorry,” Timbor said, “but we do not understand you.”
The pale man stood up and scratched his head. He was frowning now. “Yoo air knot omen lust,” he said. “Wear air yore pay pairs?”
“I’m sorry,” Timbor said again, shaking his head.
The pale man walked closer to Timbor and showed him the piece of wood with the piece of paper on top of it. Zamatryna, curious, stood on her tiptoes to peer at it too, and saw a list of words, two or three words per line. Each line had a mark next to it. It was a poem! Maybe this pale man had put the mark next to each line when he memorized it.
When he saw that she was looking, he held the paper a little lower so she could see it more easily. Then he began flipping pages. There were three pages of poetry. All the lines had marks next to them. Zamatryna wondered why he still had to carry the poem with him, if he had learned it all.
He scratched his head, flipped through the pages of the poem again, and gestured at them: follow me, come with me. “Should we go?” Harani said.
“We have little enough choice,” said Timbor, but he sounded more cheerful, and Zamatryna herself was less afraid than she had been. It was hard to be afraid of someone who memorized poetry.
So the ten of them followed the pale man to the gate, where he called out in his own language to another man, a darker man who looked more like Zamatryna’s family. The pale man showed the dark one the poem, and they spoke among themselves for a little while, very quickly, and then the dark man smiled at Zamatryna and everyone else and began saying things. He said a lot of things, in a lot of different ways. Zamatryna didn’t understand any of them, and each time Timbor said, “I’m sorry, but we don’t understand you,” the dark man looked more worried. Finally he turned to the pale man and shook his head, holding up his hands in a gesture of resignation, and then the pale man called someone else over to the group, and showed that person the poem, and they all talked together. They talked together for a long time, frowning and gesturing and looking at the pieces of paper, while Zamatryna and her family stood in the sun, getting more and more hot and thirsty.
At last the pale man sent the others away, and then he gestured at them again: follow me. He led them around the edges of what looked like a city of those ugly buildings made of cloth and wood. Zamatryna saw other people moving in the streets of that city, people who were dark like them. Most of them wore torn, threadbare clothing. Many had bare feet.
“It’s a city of Mendicants,” Zamatryna heard Macsofo murmur to his wife. “This must be a very holy place, dearest. Don’t be afraid.”
But the pale man didn’t lead them into that city. Instead he led them to a large cloth building which stood by itself some distance from the city. He took them inside, where it was slightly cooler and where there were some strange narrow beds on legs, although not enough for everyone in the family. He made gestures which meant, Zamatryna could tell, stay here. Stay here. This is where you will live. Harani began to unpack her bundle, but the pale man held up his hand and shook his head. Maybe this wasn’t where they would live, but then, what were the beds for? Macsofo tried to go outside, but again the man held up his hand. Were they prisoners?
More people came in at last. Two men brought more beds. A woman—the first Zamatryna had seen, a pale blotchy woman with hair like straw—brought warm rice and also water, which Timbor blessed. Souls of the dead, thank you for succoring us, that we may remain among the living. It comforted Zamatryna to hear the familiar words, and if the rice was bland, the water was wonderfully cool. All of the new people smiled at them while they ate the sparse meal, which seemed like a feast after the long, strange day.
After that, they sat there for a long time. The first pale man wouldn’t let them leave, although when Jamfret made gestures indicating that he had to relieve himself, one of the other people took him outside. “There’s a little building wh
ere you go,” he said when he came back. “It smells. Will we have to stay here forever?”
They sat and sat. Zamatryna amused herself by silently reciting her favorite sections of the Epic of Emeliafa.
And when the shoots came up
She greeted each one by name
For she knew them already as old friends:
Hello, sweet peas, hello carrots, hello parsnips!
Greetings my wonderful melons! Hail rutabaga!
Welcome if you are the spirits of my ancestors,
Welcome if you are the spirits of strangers,
Welcome if you contain no human spirits at all,
But only the souls of green growing things.
You shall feed my family, you shall feed the world,
Every year you shall die and come to life again
And you will give us life, and we will revere you.
Finally some new pale people came, wearing white coats and odd metal necklaces. They smiled at the family, but when they gestured for Timbor to sit on a stool so they could poke and prod him, when one of them put the ends of her necklace in her ears and then put the necklace’s pendant, a silver disk, against Timbor’s chest, Zamatryna grew frightened.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “It doesn’t hurt, little one.” And he said to all of the others, “We must do as these people say, for if we struggle against them, they might put us back outside the gate, where there is no shelter or water.”
So they stood quietly, watching. When the woman took the disk away, she smiled and then made funny blowing sounds, taking deep breaths and gesturing at Timbor. Timbor, looking bemused, imitated her, and the woman smiled and nodded and put the disk back on Timbor’s chest, and then against his back.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Timbor told them all again. “It’s a very odd ceremony, that’s all. I’m sure they would find ours strange, too.”
The woman in white performed her necklace ritual on all of them. Rikko and Jamfret competed to see who could make the funniest blowing sounds when they took their deep breaths. Macsofo scolded them—“You must not make fun of our hosts, children!”—but the man in white laughed. When it was Zamatryna’s turn, she couldn’t help but flinch a little bit, but the woman smiled and said something that sounded friendly, although of course Zamatryna couldn’t understand it.
But none of them liked the next part at all. The woman in white had Timbor sit on the stool again. She put on gloves made of pearly-colored stuff that stretched. Then she took Timbor’s arm and pulled the cloth of his tunic up over the elbow. She cleaned Timbor’s arm with a pungent liquid, even though it was already clean, and then one of the other people wearing white tied a rubber string above Timbor’s elbow. And then they took a silver needle connected to a tiny bottle and put it in Timbor’s arm until blood came out.
All the children started to cry. “What are you doing to my father?” Erolorit yelled. “Stop it!” Zamatryna could tell that he would have rushed over to try to stop the people in white, had Harani not held him back.
“It’s all right,” Timbor said again, although his voice was less steady than it had been. “It only hurts a little bit. I don’t think they are trying to harm me, although I wish I knew what they were doing.”
They took three tiny bottles of blood from Timbor’s arm. Then they wiped the place where the needle had been with more liquid, and put a paper bandage with pictures of animals on it over the wound. “Now it doesn’t hurt at all,” Timbor said with relief. The people in white smiled and nodded and gave him two little cakes to eat, and a glass of orange liquid. “See,” he told the family cheerfully, “a blessing. Perhaps we are trading blessings. Maybe that is what the blood is.” He blessed the food and drink before he ate them, and because the pale people had brought a jug of the juice and a bag of the little cakes, he blessed them all at the same time.
Because, of course, they all had to go through this ceremony, too. Aliniana nearly fainted when she saw her own blood going into the tube, but the people in white clucked and patted her and gently turned her head away, and she recovered. When it was Rikko’s turn, one of the people in white took out a puppet and made it dance to distract him. “I didn’t even feel it,” he boasted when they were done. “Those sweets taste good. I’d do it again, to get the sweets.”
Zamatryna was last, but she was less afraid than she had been at first, because everyone else seemed fine. She got to look at a new puppet, a blue dog with floppy ears and a floppy tongue, and indeed she didn’t even feel the needle, and the sweets were very good.
It was growing dark outside by the time the people in white were done with their strange rituals. The pale man turned on lanterns which shone without fire; each contained a miniature sun held in a round glass bottle. But these suns gave no warmth, and it was getting colder. Poliniana began to shiver, and Macsofo opened his bundle to get out a winter shawl for her. The pale man, the first one they had met, who had now been with them all afternoon, smiled at Macsofo, but his smile quickly changed into a frown.
Brows knitted, he stared at the bundle. He held up his hand and strode over to the bundle, and pointed.
Zamatryna craned her head to see. There were some little insects coming out of the bundle, aphids from the garden. She saw the top of a carrot sticking up among folded clothing: Macsofo must have picked carrots from the garden that morning, and some aphids had come along too.
The pale man shook his head. He looked very unhappy. He scooped up Macsofo’s entire bundle and then, to the horror of the family, he stepped on two of the aphids that had begun to crawl across the ground. After he had killed them, he bent and picked up their bodies, and then he left the building, carrying Macsofo’s bundle with him.
“How could he do that?” Harani asked. Aliniana was whimpering. “How could he just kill them? They might have been the souls of the dead!”
“Our dead mean nothing to them,” Darroti said, his voice toneless. It was the first time he’d spoken since arriving here; he had gone through all the rituals without saying a word, and refused the sweets the people in white offered him.
The pale man came back without Macsofo’s bundle. A new woman in white came with him, wearing the stretchy gloves, and looked at everyone’s head and skin. When she was done, she smiled and said something to the pale man, but he shook his head and gestured for each bundle to be opened.
“Are they going to steal our things?” Jamfret said. “All of them?”
“We must do as they say,” Timbor said, although he looked drained and gray. “They have given us food and drink and shelter. We must have faith that they do not wish to rob us.”
And so Zamatryna bent, her back to the pale people, and undid her little bundle. Here were two winter tunics and two summer ones, two pairs of leggings for each season, a warm shawl, some soft leather boots. Here, tucked inside one boot, was the wooden doll Uncle Darroti had carved for her, with its dried-berry eyes and fuzzy woolen hair. Here—what was this?
Crawling out of the top of the other boot came a beetle, dazzling yellow and orange. It glowed like a jewel in the dim light. Zamatryna’s heart leaped. It was Mim-Bim, her best, her biggest beetle, the one she had taught to jump through paper hoops for treats of sugar-water and rose petals. She had let it go; she had watched it fly away. But it had come back. Mim-Bim had come back and hid among her things, to come with her into exile.
And the pale people would kill the beetle if they saw it, as they had killed the aphids.
She had to hide it. But how? She gently picked it up and concealed it among the folds of her tunic. “Don’t let them see you,” she whispered, although not even the brightest beetle could understand speech. “Stay where you are, Mim-Bim. Don’t come out!”
She heard footsteps behind her, and turned to find the pale man smiling down at her. He took her things—although he patted her arm as he did so—and divided them as he had divided everyone else’s. The small store of food they had brought was in one pile, along with the seeds; cl
othing and prayer carpets and other soft things were in another, and tools and cooking pots—anything with a hard surface—in a third. Poliniana’s slippers were in the second pile; he hesitated over Zamatryna’s doll, but put it there too. Then he pantomimed scrubbing and washing the clothing, folding it, and giving it back to them.
“It’s already clean,” Aliniana said. “We washed everything before we left! It still smells of soap. Don’t these people have noses?”
“Peace,” Macsofo said wearily. “Do as they say.” Now the woman in white showed them a pile of clothing she had brought, ugly green pants and shirts. She gave each of them a set; she pointed to their own clothing, and then pointed to the pile. She held up a sheet and shut her eyes, and the pale man mimed getting undressed behind it.
They did as they were told. Behind the sheet, Zamatryna managed to transfer Mim-Bim from her tunic to the pocket of the new pants, which were far too large for her and dragged comically on the ground.
The pale woman put all their clothing, and the carpets and the slippers and the doll, into a shiny green bag made of very thin stuff. She put all the food into another. She left the hard things where they were, and left the tent. The pale man motioned for them to sit down, and then someone brought them more rice, with stringy meat and tasteless vegetables in it, and more of the fruit drink they had been given after being stuck with the needles.
When they were done eating, the pale man turned down the lanterns so that the room was only very dimly lit, and pantomimed sleeping. And indeed, Zamatryna found suddenly that she was wearier than she had ever been. Still wearing the ridiculous clothing they had been given, they all crawled into their narrow cots, and Timbor murmured evening benedictions to bless them all. But Zamatryna, though she was so tired, could not sleep. She felt for Mim-Bim in her pocket, and let the beetle crawl out to explore the world under the rough sheet and scratchy blanket. In the dimness, she could see the pale man sitting by the door. When he saw her looking at him, he smiled and gave her a little wave, and pantomimed sleeping again. She turned her back on him, flipping over to face the other way, and pulled the covers over her head.
The Necessary Beggar Page 3
