by Wendy Orr
The man with a crying face
carries Aissa off the mountain
past home,
because home has fire and no roof,
no Mama or Dada
or Gaggie or Poppa
or doves or Brown Dog
or Zufi or Tattie.
Turning Aissa’s face against his shoulder,
so she can’t see
what’s there
and what’s not.
But her eyes peek
and screams stay in her head,
going down the mountain
with Spot Goat bleating behind.
Staying quiet, quiet,
small, small
waiting still for Mama
when the man leaves her far away
with Fox Lady.
Fox Lady has a sharp pointed face,
sharp pointed voice;
she asks questions
that Aissa can’t answer.
Fox Lady doesn’t know that Mama said
‘Stay quiet, still as stone, till I come back.’
And Mama’s not back.
Fox Lady calls her ill-luck child,
cursed child, child that brings evil,
no child of my brother, that’s for sure.
Aissa doesn’t know all the words
but she knows what they mean
and she is quieter, stiller, smaller.
Fox Lady’s eyes are hard like rock
and her voice sharp as a knife.
So dark early morning,
silent as a secret
Fox Lady carries Aissa
out and away from the sleeping house.
Spot Goat bleats and Aissa holds out her arms,
calling with her mind.
Spot Goat comes,
trot, trot, trot,
her nose reaching for Aissa’s hand.
But Fox Lady slaps
Spot Goat’s soft nose,
Aissa’s waiting arms,
and hurries out the gate
leaving Spot Goat behind.
‘Walk!’ says Fox Lady, dumping Aissa down,
grabbing her hand to pull her along,
Aissa’s feet stumbling,
loose rocks hitting toes.
But the hand tugs and her feet hurry.
Up the path, climb another hill,
another path,
wide and smooth under Aissa’s feet,
the sky glimmering wake-up time;
a grey shimmering below
like the pond at home
but going on forever.
Fox Lady’s hand snakes out
while Aissa stares.
Fingers grab the mama stone –
the stone that’s hung from Aissa’s neck
always and forever
with the sign of her name –
but the cord doesn’t break
and Aissa bites the hand.
Slap go the fingers on Aissa’s cheek.
‘Keep it then,’ says Fox Lady.
‘They’ll still not bring you back to me.’
She grabs Aissa’s hand again,
tugging hard, tugging hurt,
climbing the road
winding further up the hill.
Darker shapes in the grey,
houses jumbled up the slope,
side by side like sleeping pups;
the mountain above them,
and a giant’s wall
like a goat pen for gods.
Now people, people all around.
Aissa smaller, silent as stone
but she can’t be still
because Fox Lady tugs her
through the darkness of nearly morning
through the people:
the mamas and dadas,
the gaggies and poppas,
Zufies and tatties –
none of them are hers.
The sky turns pink over the mountain.
The people stop, like goats in a pen.
Fox Lady lets go of Aissa’s hand.
‘Let the little one see,’ says a gaggie
and hands push her through the forest of legs
till Aissa stands with more Aissas and Zufies
pressing faces to a gate,
wooden bars against her cheek
as the sun rises over the mountain
and out of the darkness
a lady comes singing.
The Lady is dark but her voice is bright,
singing not-songs –
not mama songs or sleeping songs
or weaving songs or goat songs –
but a sound that lifts Aissa tall,
lifts her high from small still stone;
lifts, ‘Oh!’ from the people
and ‘Praise!’ and ‘Thank you, Mother!’
From a pot at the Lady’s feet
the song lifts a snake,
coiling up, standing high.
The Lady bends, reaching out
like Aissa to Spot Goat
and the snake slides up her arm,
up to her neck and down again,
till the new sun is in the sky
and the snake back in its pot.
Bright and golden,
the Lady stands in front
of the dark cave door,
while all around Aissa,
the mamas and dadas,
gaggies and poppas,
put hands on hearts
like Mama talking to little fat goddess
by the hearth where the house snake hides.
Aissa does too,
because if Aissa is good, Mama will come back.
Aissa closes eyes to see Mama better,
to call louder in her quiet still head,
so Mama will be there
when she opens her eyes.
Eyes tiny-crack-open
like watching home from bed
when Mama says sleep.
Mama’s not there.
Eyes open wide and still no Mama.
No singing Lady.
No legs all around.
No Fox Lady.
But a tall man, opening the gate,
pries Aissa’s fingers off wooden bars.
‘Where’s your mama?’
But Aissa stays quiet, still as stone,
as he carries her inside
the singing Lady’s walls.
‘Kelya!’ calls Tall Man.
A gaggie comes, crooked like Poppa,
wart on her chin
kindness in her eyes,
takes Aissa from his arms.
‘Alone?’ she says.
‘Maybe lost,’ says the man.
Kelya lady carries Aissa
on her hip just like Mama
away from Tall Man,
to the wall of the Lady’s house,
puts her down on a low stone bench
squats in front of her,
holding Aissa’s hands,
rubbing thumbs over Aissa’s wrists,
finding white moon scars that are Aissa’s own.
And she looks at the mama stone
but doesn’t touch.
‘Little one!’ says Kelya, kissing the scars,
looking around fast,
then squeezing Aissa tight,
arms like Gaggie’s
but not Gaggie.
‘No one must know!’ says Kelya
and Aissa stays quiet,
still as stone.
It’s a small island: even people who’ve lived all their lives inside the walled town, under the shelter of the chief’s hall and the Lady’s sanctuary, know someone from outside who knows someone else, till in the end everyone is connected to everywhere. They all know that the little girl has come from the raided farm.
People who’ve met her aunt aren’t surprised that she’s dumped the child at the gates. The girl is not the first orphan to be left there. She’ll be raised in the Hall with the other unfortunates and the servants’ children: a space on
the kitchen floor to sleep, food to eat when everyone else is done, and chores as soon as she’s old enough to do them.
‘She’ll talk when she’s ready,’ says Kelya. ‘She just needs time and kindness.’
But it’s a busy place. There’s not much time or kindness for a child who would rather hide than play with the other children, who bites if anyone tries to read the name-sign on her amulet.
And though the last thing Kelya wants is for Aissa to say her name out loud, where the Lady could hear, she does want her to be accepted. She sits on the stone bench with Aissa on her knees, smoothing olive oil into the black curls to comb out the twigs and tangles. Sharp tugs bring tears to the child’s eyes but she never cries, not the tiniest squeak.
If I hadn’t seen her tongue myself, Kelya thinks, I’d swear the raiders had cut it out. She finishes combing, and plaits Aissa’s hair into two long tails. ‘Lovely!’ she says, kissing the girl on the tip of her nose.
Just for a moment, she sees another face looking back at her, because Kelya is old enough to remember before the Lady was the Lady, all the way back to when she was a four-year-old girl.
Quickly, she undoes the careful plaits, rumpling the little girl’s hair into its own messy curls. People see only what they expect: no one will look closely enough to see the Lady in a cast-off child with tangled hair.
Later she sees Aissa squatting outside the kitchen garden with the potter’s daughter, making careful patterns in the dust: a ring of flowers in a circle of stones.
Kelya smiles to herself. The girl will be all right, she thinks: she’ll make her own way.
Aissa at the gates
waiting all the morning
watching for Mama who never comes,
but seeing through the bars
butterflies,
red wings on the sea
dancing in the dawn.
No one else sees,
busy, busy all around.
Guards pace,
singing Lady gone inside
with her snakes
and her crimson robe.
Watching through the gate,
as red wings sail closer,
and turn into a boat.
Guards run, singing Lady comes
no snakes or songs;
her man comes too,
the new chief in his lion cloak.
Flowing robe brushes Aissa
but the Lady doesn’t feel,
doesn’t see Aissa
trembling at her touch.
Bread lady, milk boy, washing girls, fish man,
pot lady, grain grinder,
woodchopper, hunter,
garden boy and cheese girl,
like ants rushing
from a kicked-over anthill,
screaming to the road
pushing past Aissa,
small, still-as-stone Aissa
waiting by the gate.
Even Kelya,
with her warty chin and Aissa-watching eyes
hobble-runs past
and doesn’t see Aissa.
Small Aissa tumbling
when the water boy knocks her
blood on her knee,
red and sticky pain.
Biting her stone so she doesn’t cry –
the mama stone around her neck
because Mama said,
‘Don’t make a noise,
no matter what you hear, not the tiniest peep,
stay quiet, still as stone till I come back.’
And the smell from the running people,
the rushing, shouting,
sweating people,
is the same smell as Zufi
when he shouted, ‘Raiders!’ –
the sharp and sour
stink of fear.
So Aissa crouches
in a nook in the wall
a hole too small for anyone else,
and she watches and listens,
staying quiet, still as stone.
The Bull King’s ship sails into the fishers’ cove. It’s the biggest ship that’s ever landed here, because the cove isn’t sheltered enough for big trading ships, but the Bull King’s men don’t care. They row straight in, and when the hull crunches on the pebbles, some jump off to haul the ship up onto the beach. The others stand on their rowing benches with spears raised over their shoulders, or on the front deck, bows drawn with arrows ready to fly.
There are nearly sixty of them, wearing leather war helmets, with battleaxes or daggers at their belts as well as the spears and bows in their hands – the islanders know there’s no point in fighting.
The captain and half the crew cross the beach to greet the Lady and the chief, leaving the rest to guard the ship. And although the captain uses a strange, barbaric language that the tall guard has to translate, the words stick in every islander’s head.
‘The Bull King, king of the sea, priest of the Bull God, hears that your island is troubled by slaving raids and pirates. He promises that these will end from today. In return for his protection, each year you will pay twelve barrels of olive oil, twelve goat kids, twelve jugs of wine, twelve baskets of grain, twelve baskets of dried fish, twelve lengths of woven cloth – and a boy and a girl of thirteen summers to honour the god.’
‘Your god requires children as sacrifice?’ demands the Lady.
‘Honour and glory, not sacrifice. They will join in the bull dances that the god loves. If they survive the year, they may return home and your island will be free of further tribute.’
‘Have any ever done so?’
The captain shrugs.
‘And if we refuse?’ the Lady asks, though she knows the answer.
‘Then it will not be two youths, living and dying with glory. It will be your island and all its people, and there will be no honour in their deaths and enslavements.’
2
AFTER EIGHT SPRINGS IN THE SERVANTS’ KITCHEN
The Hall and inner town are on a small plateau against the east side of the mountain. They’re protected on three sides by a great rock wall, but the fourth side is the cliff – higher, steeper and more impossible to climb than any wall. The backs of the Hall and the goddess’s sanctuary nestle into its hollows; the kitchen’s cool room and the snakes’ home are almost caves.
Between the sanctuary and the south wall, a giant boulder is wedged tight. It balances on an angle, as if the goddess has stopped it mid-bounce to protect her home. Its front is so shiny and smooth only a gecko could climb it, and it slopes out to shelter worshippers waiting to lay their offerings on the table at the sanctuary door. The top, as far as anyone can tell, slopes down to the cliff at its back. There is no way through.
No way for an adult, that is, or even a well-fed child. But if a thin-as-a-reed girl drops to the ground when no one is looking, she can slither like a snake under the gap where the edge of the boulder doesn’t quite meet the bottom of the wall.
When she was four or five or six she could huddle there as long as she liked, safely alone with her thoughts and fears. At seven the space started getting tight, but when she was eight she saw that if she squeezed along a little way further, under the bump that’s jammed against the sanctuary, there was another gap where she could stand up straight.
Now that she’s twelve, she’s an expert in shinning up that gap to the top of the boulder. As long as she’s careful to slide on her stomach once she’s up there, no one can see her from the market square. And Aissa is always careful. It’s the only way she knows how to be.
‘Aissa is always hiding,’ the other servants say, ‘Always spying,’ as if they hate her sharp eyes even more than her silent tongue. But when you’re the cursed child, hiding is the safest thing to do. And when you’re hiding, you spy.
The top of the boulder has two spying places.
The first is a chink in the south wall. If she presses her face to it she can see out to the wide world, over the hills and the shadows of distant islands far across the sea. Mama is out there somew
here.
Remembering Mama
hurts
because Aissa doesn’t know
when they’ll find
each other again,
though Aissa’s done
what Mama said,
not made a sound –
and if she hasn’t been
still as stone
she’s been as quiet.
But thinking of Dada
is worse
because Aissa knows
that she will never
see him again.
And all that is left
is the memory
of his tickling beard.
She checks the chink in the wall in case there’s a sign of Mama, but when she’s watched for a while, and can see nothing on the hills except the brown dots of goats and nothing on the sea except the grey smudges of fishing boats, she wriggles on further.
Halfway along the boulder, on the side next to the sanctuary, is a hollow about as long as Aissa. Once she slides into that, not even an eagle could see her.
It needs to be safe, because this is where she is truly, dangerously, spying. From here, she can see straight into the sanctuary.
The goddess likes her home dark, so there are no windows, just a slit under the eaves. Aissa is not only the first person to ever look in through it; she’s the first person who’s wanted to. The gods of this island are tricky beings – it’s best not to make them angry by peering into forbidden places. But this is the one place where Aissa has never felt afraid, and because no one except Kelya has ever really talked to her, she doesn’t know that she should. She just knows that she loves to stare into the darkness of the sanctuary, and the darker cave at the back where the snakes live. And since the only safe time to slip into her hiding place is before everyone else is awake and busy in the square, what she loves best is to watch the dawn ceremony as if she was in it herself.
By the flickering light of the torches on the walls, she can see the Lady select a pot from the snakes’ cave, and drop in an offering: a frog maybe, or a lizard. As the chosen asp eats its meal, the Lady begins to sing, quietly, so that no one can hear beyond the closed sanctuary door. No one except the snakes and Aissa. Sometimes, as she lies on the cold rock listening to the strange, high notes, Aissa imagines that the Lady is singing for her.
But at the last new moon, Fila began her initiation into the mysteries. Aissa should have been struck deaf already for listening.
In the eight years since Fox Lady abandoned her at the gates, Aissa has grown from a shy four year old to sharp-faced twelve. The Lady’s daughter Fila, two years younger than Aissa but half a head taller, has grown from sweet-faced toddler to sweet-faced girl. That’s just one of the differences between them. Aissa sees Fila every day, but Fila has never seen Aissa, not actually seen her, not looked in her eyes and wondered who is behind them. She doesn’t need to. Aissa will always scurry out of her way if she is sweeping or scrubbing or cleaning the privies when Fila passes.
