“Look, it’s a Gek poison.”
He squinted at the tiny point between my fingertips and the pinkish blot. “You know it?”
I shook my head.
The healer shrugged. “It’s not much use to us, even if you did. Nihil’s theurgy should get most of this solved. Thank you, though your weeds aren’t much help here.”
He hustled past as if I’d delayed him all day. Why did he treat me as if the poison were something I’d gathered? I stewed and pushed forward again, only to have the crowds press me back. More elbows and shoulders found their mark on my torso; I was being sidelined when that little pin could’ve meant saving someone’s life with the right herb-lore.
Everything I’d done out in the swamp didn’t matter at all to anyone here; I would always be the know-nothing, out of place and in the way.
Alright, let them cast their magic, for what good it would do. I tucked the pin back into a corner of my dress and felt contrary doing so. Sure, let them come to us when they ran out of other options. Maybe I’d jab that tiny bit of steel where it hurts most.
I hated being wrong in school, but it was so much worse at times like this to suspect I was right and have no one listen.
Soon, the Azwan’s punt was the only craft left in the water; all the others had been emptied and loaded onto racks by the boat ramp. Guards poled the punt in and helped S’ami onto dry ground. He turned back toward where Mami huddled beside the tin box and the gray, limp Gek. The pleasing music I’d heard on the pier that day his ship landed sounded again, sonorous and low. An answering buzz came from the boat, from where Mami hugged her knees to her chest. Poor, brave Mami. She didn’t budge at all, and though her eyes didn’t move from the bottom of the boat, she didn’t let on how terrified she must be. But I could see her face tighten, her lips pursed.
The buzzing—the same grating sound I’d heard earlier—grew louder as the box levitated and began spinning. S’ami’s sound matched it, and the two noises dueled, one chiming and sweet, the other scraping and bitter. I know which I preferred. What I didn’t know was which one to root for. Maybe they’d destroy each other, and we’d all go home, tired but triumphant. I imagined a sad ballad for the tragic hero S’ami, sung in our Ward by a dour-faced choir, everyone weeping whether they’d witnessed his fall or not.
The ballad would have to wait. S’ami wrapped his protective sphere of light around the box as it shot forward, rotating corner over corner, tumbling in a crazy, twirly, nonsense way within that sphere. The box didn’t open, and nothing spilled out, but the entire crowd ducked as the sphere sailed past, barely clearing the tops of our heads.
The guards parted the crowd and led S’ami through, falling in behind him as the tin box flashed ahead. The barge pulled out as soon as S’ami was aboard, with workmen rowing in long strokes. Soon, the constables were gone, too, and the healers had left with the main party. Even the dock owner was off tying up his boats with his crew.
I helped Mami out of the punt, and she collapsed onto shore, resting her head between her knees. I rubbed between her shoulders and took a deep breath. I fixed my head scarf back around my mouth again—it wasn’t terribly secure, but it didn’t seem to matter at the moment.
“We made it, Mami. We got lucky.”
She peered up at me. “I don’t feel particularly lucky.”
“What do you suppose was in that box?”
Mami stared at the roaring fire on the horizon. “Something worth destroying a civilization for, I guess, and risking even the soldiers’ lives. I’d have thought he’d care more about them, at least.”
“Their Commander said thirty-three were dead,” I said. “The box must hold something S’ami can’t do without.”
Mami nodded. “It’s hard to know what to believe. All I can say is that we were all very, very wrong to presume it was just a lump of rock from one of the other planets or a spark from the sun. I don’t know that anyone really wanted it to be a demon. Except the Azwan of Uncertainty, that is.”
I gave a quick glance around to make sure no one heard her. The dockworkers were straggling away in twos and threes. Even so, I kept my voice low. “He did seem proud of himself.”
“It’s his moment,” Mami said. “Some history scroll somewhere will carry his name someday.”
“And us?”
“Lucky to be alive. Like you said.”
She leaned into me and let out a few short sobs. I held her and let her cry softly into my shoulder for a few moments. I swallowed back the lump in my own throat, but I let her take her time until she was ready to draw a deep breath and sit up again.
When Mami spoke next, her voice was raggedy. “We are lucky to be alive, Hadara. It just bothers me that I ought to feel grateful to the Azwan who put us in harm’s way.”
“I know, Mami,” I said, feeling useless. What else was there to say?
I hesitated before I asked my next question, staring at the small creature huddled in the boat, her chest rising and falling but otherwise motionless. There was something I had to know, and I thought I’d earned the right to know it. “Is now a bad time to ask about my grandmother?”
Mami exhaled sharply. “No, I guess it isn’t.”
“You said something to the Azwan about her and Reyhim.”
Mami gave me one of her sidelong looks that told me she was weighing how much I ought to know. “Ask away.”
“Is he my grandfather?”
Mami shrugged. “I never wanted him to be my father, so I never asked, to be honest. It stopped mattering to me long ago, and it clearly never mattered to him. I thought you were interested in my mother?”
“Yes!” I nearly shouted. “Everything, please. The herbs, the heresy, everything.”
She launched into her story: Her mother had gathered herbs and made medicines much the same as her mother before her and on down since the island had been settled centuries earlier. Mother to daughter, generation to generation, a world of herb-lore passed on by word of mouth alone. Ward Sapphire had always taken what it wanted but otherwise looked the other way. The women of my mother’s line had always obliged—until my grandmother refused.
“I don’t know what set her off, really,” Mami said. “Whether it was the end of her affair with Reyhim, or something else. I was a child, remember.”
“I know, but I think I’m confused,” I said. “Are you saying the Ward turned on her after she stopped gathering herbs?”
Mami coughed and gagged from a sudden puff of smoke that hit us. I helped her unwrap her own scarf so she could hold it over her face. It made for a flimsy mask, but it was better than breathing the ash directly. We’d left a water jug in the punt, and I fished it out. Mami continued after we both took a drink, easing the searing soreness in our throats, and splashed some of it into our stinging eyes.
A fever had broken out in Port Sapphire, Mami said, probably brought over in one of the merchant ships. It had spread in a few six-days from one end of town to the other, killing the old, the very young, and anyone already sick. Then it began killing those in the prime of health. Mami’s voice caught as she spoke. It had been a painful time. The healers went from home to home, and when stronger magic was needed, the priests went, too. Water was purified, food was blessed, entire canals were emptied and refilled. Nothing worked.
“And through it all, your grandmother refused to grind a single root or steep so much as a leaf.”
I sat in shock. “How could she sit by and watch people die?”
“She told people if they believed in the Temple of Doubt’s teachings, they should let the Temple cure them.”
“And that didn’t sit well with the Temple, I’m sure.” I was having trouble swallowing this. I’d have her hanged, too, I decided.
Mami propped her chin on one elbow and stared off at the distant fire again. “You think the Temple likes to be seen failing at anything?”
Something occurred to me, a connection forming in my brain. I reversed what Mami had said, about teachings an
d cures. “Was your mother saying that, if they wanted her help, they had to stop believing in the Temple? In Nihil’s power?”
Mami whipped her head toward where the dock owner had lashed the last of his boats together, except the one at our feet. “Shhh . . . yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
I turned that over in my head a few moments. How could someone not believe in Nihil’s power? He was Nihil. He was god. He put us here and gave us life and the Eternal Tree for afterward. How could someone tell everyone to just forget about him? I may be a bad student, but I wasn’t stupid. I believed in a Nihil that other people had seen and talked to and even lain down with and whose magic was tangible and real, even if the priests and healers couldn’t always make it work, even if it did nothing at all but was just for show, which is what I’d suspected for some time.
I didn’t budge. “I really don’t understand. How could she tell people not to believe in Nihil’s magic? What were they supposed to do instead? If they don’t go to the Temple, where do they go?”
Mami grinned. “You’re getting this much faster than I did. I was already married to your father when I started hearing stories about my mother and the things she said and what she was trying to do.”
“What was she trying to do?”
Mami laughed. I was shocked. We were talking about my grandmother’s terrible blasphemies that had rightly gotten her hanged.
“You’re laughing,” was all I could manage to say.
“I know I shouldn’t,” Mami said. “But I think I’m entitled to say what I want today, considering what the Temple just put me through.”
“Me too, then.”
“Yes, you, too. So, talk. I know that look, Hadara. You have a hundred things whirling around in that busy mind of yours.”
I inhaled, deep and long. Best to start with something small and solid. The not-believing part was much too huge and shapeless to wrestle to the ground just yet. “Why do we keep doing it? The herbs. It’s blasphemy, right? Or something like double-triple blasphemy to keep gathering them if grandmother was meant to be an example.”
Mami nodded. “Alright, that’s an easy one. The elder women all around me insisted on it. My mother and grandmother had taught a number of the local ladies a little herb-lore, just bits and pieces, here and there, in case the worst happened, which it did. So the other women taught me. One knew a few salves, another could make tinctures, a third had some tisane blends I should know. Imagine if all this knowledge vanished; imagine no way to treat all the aches and pains and diseases for all those times Nihil’s magic falls short.
“Even the Ward priests never meant to carry their threats too far. Reyhim was the only one who seemed intent on following Scriptures down to the last detail, and no one else was going to stand up to him. But once Reyhim got his promotion to Azwan and left us, Ward Sapphire went right back to tolerating the herb-lore. Nihil had made it clear more mass deaths from a natural cause wouldn’t be tolerated, but they couldn’t muster up the magic to cure so many. I suppose the priests had to weigh the greater and lesser evils.”
This was what it meant to be a woman in my line, then. Mami carried on the family business despite its danger. She didn’t dare stop. She had to keep balancing along the edge of that invisible, ever-moving line between what the priests said and what they really seemed to want. And I’d likely have to do the same.
We didn’t get to pass along a name, like my father’s house was known by his name because of his high standing in Port Sapphire. Mami and I passed along our store of knowledge, and it stretched across generations. People would depend on us even if it cost our lives.
“But the healers pushed me out of the way just now,” I said, my voice insolent. “They had no use for anything I could offer.”
Mami shook her head. “What I saw was you looking irritated and hurt. You were thinking more about yourself, Hadara, while the healers rightly focused on the injured. That’s a hard lesson, I know. It’s one that only experience can teach you.”
If she started on the you’re-too-young part that I sometimes got, I was going to boil over. I decided to steer the conversation back to where I’d started.
“Why am I hearing this now for the first time?” I sounded like a little girl throwing a tantrum, but I couldn’t stop. “You held this back from me. All of it.”
Mami gave me a shrewd, calculating look, the kind she levels at Babba when she wants something he’s not prepared to give. “Would you have listened?”
I had no answer. Probably not. Maybe thinking it was all a grand, vaguely daring adventure was the part that had appealed to me. I sighed, letting some of the tension seep away. “Why does the Temple both reward and punish us?”
“I don’t know, blossom. It’s the Temple of Doubt, remember, not the temple of faith or compassion or even wisdom. And we really must go—here comes that dock owner.”
I wasn’t nearly ready to leave. I hadn’t gotten to the larger questions yet.
I grabbed her arm. “It’s not good enough. I’ll have to spend my whole life doing as you have. You can’t simply say, it’s the Temple of Doubt, so hide your doubts and live with it. How do you live with it?”
She patted my arm. “Time for that later.”
The dock owner had turned and was waving at us. He called over, “You still need the boat?”
Mami shook her head, and we stood up and dusted ourselves off as best we could. I leaned into the craft and scooped up the Gek. It didn’t seem right to leave her.
“Hadara, no,” Mami said.
I hesitated. We were likely in enough trouble already. “If you really think I ought not to . . .”
“How would we hide her? What do you think the high priest would say? Besides, what do you think we’d do with her?”
“Take care of her,” I said, realizing how feeble I sounded.
“She’s not a pet.”
“I know. Really, I do. She’ll go when she’s ready.”
We both took a long look back at the burning swamp. The flames were dying down, but smoke singed our nostrils, even through our scarves. The Gek child might never go home again from what I could see, but I didn’t have any other answer.
Mami paused and then spoke haltingly. “Alright. You did say she’s the shaman’s daughter. Maybe we should take care of her because we owe them at least that much. And I suppose one more by our hearth won’t change much. I’ll think up something to tell the priest.”
We got ready to go, Mami giving a final wave to the dock owner as he stared slack-jawed at the Gek in my arms. “Suppose you got the Azwan’s alrighty for that? They make awful pets, though. Mind you—feed ’em their fish, or they’ll be into your pantry.”
Mami thanked him, and we made our goodbyes. I’d tethered our canoe far from the boat launch that morning to stay out of everyone’s way. I was happy I’d picked an isolated spot at the end of a fat stub of dry land, covered with trees and brush but within easy sight of the city. I lay the Gek in the canoe, where she turned over soundlessly.
“They don’t take much to magic, do they?” I asked. “It does things to them.”
“Us, too,” Mami said. “They just show it sooner.”
“How does it harm us?”
“It makes us rely on easy answers, for starters,” Mami said. Her soft features hardened into a sneer that wasn’t typical for her. “Can’t do something for yourself? Get the priest to wave his talisman over you. Maybe it’ll happen. Maybe not. If it doesn’t, ah well, maybe your doubts are too strong, and Nihil can’t bother with you. For the privilege of possibly having Nihil’s brief attention, you get to let the priest have a say in every aspect of your life.”
With that, Mami snatched several canvas sacks from the canoe.
“Wait a moment,” I said. “It’s not that you don’t believe in Nihil. It’s the Temple that bothers you. I can see that. I want them gone, same as you. I do! Was my grandmother like this, too?”
It was as if Mami were a full wat
erskin and she’d suddenly deflated. She seemed smaller, frailer. “No, I’m sorry. I do get cynical. It’s a feeling far beyond doubt, maybe all the way into despondent.”
“Was this how . . .”
“No, she was hopeful, your grandmother. She was all sunshine and hugs and ‘There—don’t you feel better now?’ And I know Reyhim adored her. But he saw a chance to further himself, and my mami’s corpse was his stepping stone.”
I threw my arms around her. “I’m so sorry. Oh, Nihil’s earlobes, I’m the sorriest person ever. I wanted that tin box for myself, I did, so I could get the Temple to leave our island for good. I thought I could help in some crazy way.”
Mami hugged back. “Hadara, that’s terrible. Noble and selfless and kind, but truly terrible. If that thing is what the Azwan says it is, it would destroy you. No, Hadara, we stick to what we know, you and I.”
She shoved an armload of canvas sacks at me. I groaned, knowing what she intended. We’d left before dawn and it was then sometime between high heat and latesun, with no break for meals and no rest from the heat or soot. I was tired and eager for home. Mami had other ideas and patted a sack for emphasis.
“We’re out,” she said. “Of everything.”
“What if someone sees us? There are guards everywhere.” Being aware of the Temple’s hypocrisies didn’t make me any less fearful of crossing that invisible line they kept redrawing.
“We’ve been with the Azwan today,” Mami said. “That’ll cover us. I reason this is our only chance for a while. Let’s make the best of it.”
Imagine if all this knowledge vanished.
But then another voice rang in my ears, that of the Commander: he’d rather swallow poison than a potion.
On the mainland and closer to the Temple of Doubt, there was no room for what Mami and I did. My heart pounded in my rib cage thinking of Valeo stretched out, unconscious, possibly dead, with no way to help him. Yes, something in nature cooked up by the Gek had done that to him, but something in nature could be curing him, too, perhaps. Deep within, I’d always had more faith in Mami’s wild harvest than in magic, but hearing her say it aloud confirmed it for me more solidly.
The Temple of Doubt Page 13
