by Wendy Orr
even though Mama said,
‘Stay quiet,
still as stone till I come back.’
But Mama’s not coming back,
and maybe Mama’s not Mama.
Aissa’s alone
and making noise
doesn’t betray Mama.
Making noise
could be strength.
Next time the wolf might be real. She doesn’t want to go back but she doesn’t want to die and there aren’t any other choices. Squint-Eye said the Lady allows her to live. She is banned from the Hall but not the town. She will find a place to hide and be safe.
Aissa picks a grey-green twig and salutes the bush in thanks. Its scent stirs a memory that she can’t find.
The rain comes out of nowhere. The gods pour rivers over her, washing her clean. When it stops she feels dazed and even emptier than she did before. The old Aissa has been hollowed out and thrown away.
She’s run so far she’s not sure where she is. Her ankle is aching and she has to get a stick to lean on. Even when she finds the trail she goes slowly, and it’s dark when she reaches the garden gate.
The guards pass; her teeth are chattering so hard that she has to bite her tongue to stop the noise. Luckily the guards never worry about the back gate; they stroll through the garden more to keep themselves awake than to check who might be on the other side. The instant they turn their backs she’s through.
From there it’s a quick hobble across the square to the sanctuary boulder. She doesn’t have to think about it – she’s never spending another night behind the compost heaps.
Now it doesn’t matter that it’s dark: her feet and hands, knees and elbows all know the way. She slithers under, wriggles up, and slides into her hollow by the window.
The dark in the sanctuary is a deeper black than the air around her. There’s nothing to see: the Lady and Fila are in their own chambers, in beds with soft fleeces and warm woven covers.
Aissa slides down further to get her face out of a puddle, and sleeps in her cold rock bed.
6
THE SANCTUARY CAVE
Aissa wakes to the sound of mewing.
Milli-Cat never comes into the kitchens when everyone’s sleeping!
But Aissa’s not on the kitchen floor with the other servants. It’s still dark on the second morning of her outcast life; she’s tucked into the hollow by the sanctuary window – and a pink cat nose is rubbing against her cheek.
How did you get here?
As if in answer, Milli-Cat jumps to the top of the boulder, looking back over her shoulder to check that Aissa’s following.
Aissa does what she’s told – Milli-Cat is so sure and bossy with her Mrrp! meow that she has to trust her.
The cat trots down the slope towards the cliff face. Aissa skids down it on her bottom.
The cat disappears into the darkness. Aissa slides after her, right over the edge.
Aissa making noise again:
mouse-squeak of surprise
as she hits the ground;
sigh of relief
because it wasn’t far
and she didn’t land
on Milli-Cat.
Though she doesn’t know
how she’ll get out again
and thinks maybe
she’ll soon be a real ghost
not just the half-ghost
Squint-Eye ordered.
She’s in a cave
half-filled with rocks
tumbled down in the boulder’s crash;
a space safe from wind
or burning sun
and almost from rain –
the puddles at the front
are small.
And it’s tall enough,
once she ducks inside,
that Aissa can stand
without bowing her head.
Milli-Cat purrs,
twining round her legs
till Aissa touches
smooth white fur,
soft and sleek,
sinewy strong underneath.
Because Milli-Cat
might belong to the Lady
but she has chosen Aissa
for her own –
and no one can see them here.
So Aissa strokes
and Milli-Cat purrs
till Aissa jumps awake
because there’s not much time
till the day begins
and for so many years
that’s meant
sweeping the square
clean of dog dirt and leaves,
scrubbing out privies,
throwing fresh earth down the holes.
Knowing that she doesn’t exist
takes a lot of remembering
but yesterday’s rain
and tears
have washed away
the confusion:
if she doesn’t exist
she can’t do chores.
No one can punish
someone they can’t see.
But the square has to be swept
and privies have to be cleaned.
Wormbreath’s son Pigeon-Toe
can use a broom
but is still too small
to haul water or earth.
A worm of joy
wriggles through Aissa
because sharp-faced twins
can share cleaning privies
but they will hate it
twice as much.
Aissa will need
to stay hidden from them
because if they have the chance to hurt
they’ll forget she doesn’t exist.
The cave is night-time safe
but she hasn’t eaten
for two long days;
she needs to get out
to find water, food,
a place to spy,
and to use the privy –
the privy that she
won’t have to clean.
The gap between boulder and cliff
is easier to fall down
than pull up.
Aissa grabs the edge,
swings from her hands,
but her head misses the gap,
bumps hard,
and her knees slam the cliff.
The cliff wall
is too smooth to climb
and so is the sanctuary.
There’s no gap at all
on the town wall side.
But her cave floor
is littered with rocks.
Aissa finds a big one, flat on top,
too heavy to lift,
so she sits with her back
against the pile,
shoves with her feet
and hurting ankle
to roll the rock against the cliff;
shoves a smaller one tight beside
to stop its wobble –
and Aissa has built a step.
Now her head is as high as the gap.
She pulls up,
slides onto the boulder
creeping up the steep slope
to the window hollow.
Too early still
for the Lady and Fila
though the sky is grey
instead of black
and it’s time
to slide like a snake
down the gap
and into the square.
No one on the island has seen the bull dances, but they’ve all heard the stories.
Minstrels describe the excitement, the drama, the emotions of the crowd, the betting. Traders are surer of the details: the first day of spring, in a courtyard of the Bull King’s palace. There might be others during the year, but they’re not important. The palace is huge, bigger than the Lady’s town, but that’s not important either. What’s important is what happens. What’s important is the bulls.
The tall guard who speaks the Bull King’s language saw the bulls when he sailed on a trading ship; he says their shoulders are tall
er than he is, and their hooves as big around as his head. Their bodies are thick and as solidly muscled as wild boars, their horns long and curved, and when they gallop the ground thunders.
It’s a long time since the tall guard’s been at sea, so maybe the bulls have grown in his memory. Nothing could be as big as he claims.
But little by little, the Lady and the chief have worked out a picture. The dancers are highly skilled.
‘They’re fast,’ say the traders.
‘Best tumblers I’ve ever seen.’
‘And strong.’
‘Handsprings, somersaults, backflips . . .’
‘All across a bull’s back.’
‘No wonder half of them die while they’re training.’
‘Then we’ll start their training here,’ says the Lady. She tries to convince a troupe of tumblers to stay and teach, but tumblers are used to moving, island to island, audience to audience. They’re gone before first light, afraid that the islanders might not take no for an answer.
The Lady and the chief replay the acrobats’ act in their minds. The Lady can’t discuss it with anyone else in case they realise there are things she doesn’t know, but the chief talks it over with the guards. Tigo, the youngest guard, can walk on his hands. He’s never managed to do a backflip, but he thinks he can work it out. He’s put in charge of training.
Every year something is added to the training; every year Tigo is a little better at teaching it. The year that Nasta and Luki are chosen is the sixth year. The chief, the Lady and the guards are all determined that this time it will make a difference.
Aissa doesn’t care. She doesn’t want to watch them training for something that she knows in her heart is hers. She doesn’t care if the new dancers live out their year in the bullring, or if the island has to pay tribute forever. She can’t worry about anything now except how to survive.
Though it turns out that their training is very useful for her survival. Later on, in the heat of summer or chill of winter, no one will be nearly as keen to join in, but in this restless spring weather, runners want to race them and wrestlers want to wrestle. Everyone wants to see how the new dancers perform. The other twelve year olds watch especially jealously, jostling around, showing off their own handstands and roaring with laughter every time Nasta or Luki falls over.
‘Shoo!’ Tigo shouts, flapping them away like stray dogs.
The families of the dancers who haven’t returned are watching just as closely. They desperately want these two to survive, and they just as desperately want them not to be as good as their own children. They can’t decide which one they want more, and they can’t stop watching.
And while they’re watching Nasta and Luki, Aissa’s watching their market stalls. She’s finally discovered what’s worse than the thin end of the servants’ gruel: nothing. Even when all that was left of the meat was a hint of its flavour, and the vegetables were a shredded mush, there were still bits of barley to roll on her tongue and suck through her teeth. And it was always there. She misses that twice-a-day stomach-filling warmth.
Aissa is very, very hungry.
Silent as stone,
soft as a ghost,
Aissa slips through the Hall
because the Hall folk don’t know
she doesn’t exist
and see only a servant girl
clearing scraps from tables,
the remains of platters
laden with food –
barley cakes and honey,
the last dried figs,
soft curds of goat cheese –
taking them back
for the servants’ meal.
They don’t see that the girl
with her head bowed low,
moves the platters,
but never takes them to the kitchen.
They see her reach under a table,
as a good servant should,
for the dropped fig
and broken barley cake
but don’t see her swallow both
before she stands.
But Aissa, gulping hard,
sees a twin head –
the rightful clearer of platters –
approaching the door from the kitchen,
and Aissa steps
behind a pillar
out to the square
as Half-One walks in.
In the square Half-Two,
forgetting she can’t see
the one who doesn’t exist,
spits hard –
a slimy glob of hate
on Aissa’s face.
Aissa wipes with a finger
and flicks it back.
So all these days
the rest of the town
watches bull dancers
and Aissa watches
the rest of the town.
Drifting on the edges
like a shadow,
scurrying through hidey holes
like a rat
chased and despised,
racing the dogs
for a bone
thrown from a feast,
sweeping spilled grains
from the stone grinder in the square,
where lucky people
with barley to crush
smash it from grains to flour.
Because after the first morning
the servants are quicker
to guard their share
from meals from the Hall
and there’s nothing left
to feed compost worms
or Aissa.
Half-One and Half-Two
would eat till they sicked it back up
before they left something
that Aissa could eat.
The third day without food
her weakened body sleeps through morning
and she slides out from her cave
while the world rests
in the warmth of noon.
At the door of the sanctuary
the table’s been cleared
of morning offerings,
but unseen, underneath,
is a bouquet of pigweed
and twelve dried raisins –
a gift from the goddess
telling Aissa to live.
So sometimes
in the busy market,
an olive stored from autumn,
a chunk of octopus leg,
a roasted snail
slides from the stall
to Aissa’s hand
and mouth.
Till the day she sees
thin spears of asparagus
fresh and juicy,
heaped to tempt.
The watching woman
spits, ‘Get out of here!’
and Aissa flees.
But a voice in her head says,
‘You found asparagus
long ago
in the hills with Kelya,
and just last year
for Half-One and Half-Two.
You can find it again
for you.’
7
THE HILLS
The world is new and different – or maybe Aissa is. She’s only a shadow in town, but when she’s out in the hills she’s alive. It’s as if she’s just learned to breathe.
Of course she’s not the only one out foraging. It’s springtime, and after a long winter of dried food, everyone’s hungry for fresh green plants. Fat-leafed pigweed and feathery fennel, nettles that don’t sting once they’re cooked, the unfurling new leaves of wild grapes, mallow and thistle and wispy ram’s beard . . . they’re all begging to be picked, and most mornings, someone from nearly every family on the island will be wandering the meadows and forests to do it. Only the Hall folk and their servants wait in town for other people to gather food for them.
Baby animals appear too, as if the sun’s warmth has magicked them out of the rocks and shadows. Young hares, rabbits, hedgehogs, deer and ibex are easy prey for slings or arrows. Trees hold e
ggs in nests, and there are strange birds that land for only a few days, in spring and again in autumn. Sometimes they crash to the ground in high winds and are too exhausted to escape a hungry hunter.
The only problem is the other hungry hunters. The chief killed the last lion for his cloak when he married the Lady, but there are still bears, boars, lynx and wolves and now they all have young to feed. They like the same meats that people do, but they don’t mind adding humans to their menu.
So nobody walks the hills alone, unless they’re a hunter or a goatherd with a good sling for rocks. Half-One and Half-Two, before they thought of making Aissa go, always went with girls from the town. Even the wise-women, if they’re going far from other gatherers, take a hunter with them.
But for Aissa, a wild-haired, fur-cloaked hunter is just one more thing to run from.
Aissa doesn’t have
a bow with arrows,
a spear,
or even
a sling like Zufi’s
when he guarded the goats –
though it didn’t save him
from the raiders.
She could make a sling
if she only had
a knife to cut cord,
a spindle to make it,
something to spin –
and a basket to collect it –
but she doesn’t know how
to make any of those
because a privy-cleaner
doesn’t learn much else –
just knows she needs them
to survive as more
than a hunted rat.
Needs to learn
what the tiniest children know
if they have mamas or dadas,
gaggies or poppas,
or anyone
who loves them.
Like a song,
at the back of her mind
is an almost-memory:
a child warm on her grandmother’s knee,
Gaggie’s old hands
guiding Aissa’s young ones
to whirl the spindle
that spins Spot Goat’s hair
into yarn.
If Aissa can learn
to spin again
it means she can learn
to be a little
like everyone else –
but all her memory gives her
is that glimpse of love
and sometimes
it hurts too much
to remember that.
So when she sees
a spindle winding wool,
up the spike in its round clay disc,
that disc might as well be gold
for all the chance
Aissa has to own it.
Because the grieving potter
is still so sure
that Aissa’s curse
killed her daughter,
that she would smash
