Mire

by Vivien Leanne Saunders

  That’s not to say that women on the island did not connect with their victims – far from it! Our work was exhilarating. The lean, hard bodies of the sailors were as intoxicating to our matriarchal cult as the quick minds of their leaders. We shared their final days and welcomed them into our beds. We bore their children into the world long after they had died, and we called the girls ‘beloved’. We gave our lives up to captivate each man we met, and then we forgot them the moment they were gone.

  Janine and I became friends. It was a peculiar, prickly friendship. Our shared victim was an aching scar. Neither of us were the commiserating type. We exchanged insults and mocked each other instead. I never seemed to offend her, but she had a talent for getting under my skin.

  “Clay! I heard the cats yowling all night; I thought you were outside with one of your men!”

  My friend was publically stripped of her Siren status. She skivvied for six months before Sweetwater grudgingly let her join the seamstresses. Janine gave the first dress that she made to me. It was a winter gown: dark blue wool lined with silk the iridescent green of an insect’s wing. When I wore it I looked austere. When I walked the skirt flared out, revealing the sheer fabric clinging to my legs. I wondered if Janine was making a snide joke about my methods. I learned to walk so that I could make the green panels flare out whenever I swayed my hips.

  The gown made Janine infamous. She made us increasingly risqué costumes until Sweetwater scolded us for being too obvious. Fashions changed so quickly that most of the women did not mind, but Janine was too stubborn to quit. She brought me dresses with high collars and long sleeves, but she would line the seams with gold thread so that they glittered when the dress was pulled open, or include false panels that could be unlaced to expose the line of my thigh or the curve of my breasts. I wore them all with a mischievous grin and told the Mistresses that I had altered the patterns myself. I gained a reputation as a seamstress, which annoyed Janine no end. She wasn’t convinced that I knew how to thread a needle.

  she was one of the few women who I could confide in. Neither of us would gain anything by slandering the other, and both of us were disliked enough to need each other. The servant’s wing was as cramped and crowded as the apprentice lodgings, so on the nights when I wasn’t working Janine shared my room. We sat and read to each other. We did not gossip or sew. We were both off duty, after all.

  One night, Janine brought a bottle of wine with her. She knew that I did not like to drink, but she confessed that she needed the alcohol to loosen her tongue. “I owe you an explanation,” she said haltingly, “about what happened between us.”

  My friend drank half of the bottle before she raised her skirt and showed me a long, thin scar which ran up her inner thigh. While working as a Siren she had been given to a sadist. The fruit knife he had stolen from the kitchen was so sharp that she was bleeding before she realized she had been cut. After that, Janine couldn’t stop herself from being afraid. When our shared victim mocked her she was sure that he really meant her harm. She hid in the privy until her trembling eased. By then he was gone.

  The story had made me feel ill. Most of the criminals were given so many drugs that they were as biddable as kittens. When I lay in their arms, basking in the afterglow, I had often forgotten that they were dangerous. Even the most diligent women could be distracted, and I was far from diligent.

  Sweetwater didn’t tell us what the men had done until she handed us the poison. It was so we weren’t afraid of the murderers or disgusted by the rest. I had never been attacked, but I knew that it was only a matter of time. If we were lucky, the scars would heal smoothly and we could keep working. If we were unlucky, we would become servants. There was a reason why so many children were born and bought. We were surrounded by the most dangerous men in the world, and we could not always outwit them. Many Siren’s nerves failed them long before their bodies aged.

  Even Dahra hadn’t been clever enough to outwit her victims. The wound on her stomach had been a gift from a hallucinating rapist. He had slashed at her with a shard of tile. Dahra did not call for her guard. She shoved the man off her and watched his head crack against the edge of the pool. Oily grey clots followed the blood into the perfumed water.

  If we had known about that, we would have whispered less in her lessons.

  Janine drunkenly told me that she had grown up with a girl called Lindel. The girls were so close that they crawled into each other’s beds when they had nightmares. They had become Siren at the same time. They spent their first few weeks clinging to each other at night, but they could not find comfort in it. They submitted to their own foul tasks, but couldn’t bear to think that the other girl had been forced to do the same things.

  Lindel writhed and wept in her dreams. One night she clutched at her bed-mate so fiercely that Janine’s flesh was bruised. Janine kissed her, and held her, but in the morning she woke up with empty arms. Nobody knew where Lindel had gone. Janine was frantic, but Sweetwater refused to send the servants out looking for a ‘silly runaway’.

  That should have been a warning, I thought. Sweetwater already knew where Lindel was. She just didn’t want Janine to know.

  My friend scoured the pier and the apprentice wing, and even climbed up to the lighthouse. She begged the other Siren and the servants to help her, but the younger ones were scared to break Sweetwater’s command, and the older ones looked away.

  Finally, the servants were ordered to search the woods. It did not take long to find the girl. Her body swung from the willow tree like a vine. She wore her plain apprentice clothes, her face was bare and her hair was loose. The rope had cut so deeply into her neck that when they cut her down her head fell back like a living thing.

  The servants were not allowed to let Janine see her friend’s body, but that night they slid a note under her door. It was in Lindi’s writing, and the paper was so stained with dew that it crumbled in her hands.

  ‘I love you. I am not strong enough to stay. Please don’t follow me. I love you.’

  The body was burned – a final, petty insult. A weak Siren suffered the same indignity as the murderers and rapists she had failed to condemn. Lindel was not the first Siren to falter, and I’m sure she was not the last. Janine had to sneak away to watch when the furnace was lit.

  Everything Janine loved had turned to ashes, and it was the Siren who had done it. She hated them. She hated herself just as much. She should have – could have – done more. She could have kissed Lindel goodbye. She could have found her body before the rain had stolen its last shred of dignity. She could have mourned her lover instead of lying to protect herself. She could have done more.

  After that, Janine wanted to do was hide. The glorious life of a Siren was torture for her. Sweetwater had no idea that servitude was a reward, and not a punishment.

  I wondered what kind of servant I would become. I couldn’t sew, cook or tolerate children. I had lost my way in the tunnels when I was exploring the pier. I ended up peeking through the mortuary doorway. I saw a nurse standing over a table, chipping away at a man’s skull with a metal file. Of course, the man was already dead – but what horror! The nurse was prying the gold teeth from his jaw before the furnace melted them down. Death had never worried me. The island was so thick with it that I could see the leering darkness crawling up men’s spines. But the indignity of rummaging through their filth and scavenging from their bones was abhorrent. If a vile woman like that had touched my skin I would have slapped her filthy hand away.

  Dahra had faded from my life like smoke. I honestly did not miss her until several months had passed. While I would take my men to one of my private haunts, she would disappear with her own into the pleasure house. She would ply them with liquor or smoke, rub their skin with balms, and make them so relaxed that they often died thinking they had dreamed her up. It was a gentler method than my own, but it needed far more patience. It took a lot of skill to weave such a soft web around tarnished minds.

  We both
spent as much time out of our rooms as we did in them, and our free time never seemed to line up. I found out later that Dahra had asked Sweetwater to arrange it so that she did not have to see me. I was too angry at my Mistress to feel jilted; I was relieved that she had weakened first. Dahra’s anger cooled long before my heart thawed, and she tried to speak to me several times, but I rebuffed her. I made snide comments until she grew angry and beat me as she had when I was a child. She was punished for the bruises which marred my skin, and I was banned from the kitchen for a week for provoking her.

  It may seem harsh to be punished for such a petty thing, but you have to remember that there were only a few hundred Siren on the island. A small fight could easily split our careful lives into pieces, as everyone bickered and argued over who was in the right. Sweetwater had a blunt, effective solution: if two people argued, they were both in the wrong.

  I spied on my old Mistress a few times, but her shy performances made me turn away. I was angry enough to convince myself that she had no art at all, simply a huge supply of drugs. Her enchantments had nothing to do with her soft, soothing words. The men smoked and swallowed until their heads were filled with fog. They would have cosied up to an octopus.

  I knew I was being unfair. After a few months I felt that I should apologise to my Mistress for thinking so badly of her. I was planning to finally speak to her – honestly, I was - when she disappeared from the complex altogether. One of the old women told me, in whispers, that my Mistress was pregnant. The rumour was that she had made a mistake brewing her protection liquor, but I knew that it was untrue. Dahra was as strict with her recipes as she was with her apprentices. If she had misjudged her dose, then she had done it on purpose.

  Dahra locked her room and took a single bag of belongings with her up to the mountain. The birthing house lay just below the summit, hidden but not choked by the smoke from the lighthouse. She would stay there until the baby was born, and then she would leave it in the care of the midwives and return to work. If it was a girl, she would see it again in five years when it was sent down to the training complex to start its lessons. If it was a boy, the guards would take it to the Mainland and foster it in a wealthy household. You could recognise such orphans by their peculiar beauty, and the differences in their hair, skin or eyes which could only come from another race.

  I couldn’t imagine a woman as stubborn as Dahra giving up her baby. She couldn’t be carrying anything but another Siren in her belly. Sure enough, the woman had a daughter who grew up to be one of the most infamous Siren in the world. But that was many years away, when the word ‘Siren’ meant something quite different.

  Dahra was missed – or, at least, her herb craft was. Without her advice the Siren distrusted their own skills. They started getting their victims drunk instead of drugging them, because they were scared to misjudge a dose. Alcoholism rose among the Siren as they gorged themselves on wine every night. They spent their time making outrageous jokes with the bawdiest men and completely ignoring their real charges. Every morning the living quarters would echo with groans. Nobody was awake and beautiful before mid-afternoon. Smudged eyes and wine-stained gowns became the fashion, and the smell of perfume gave way to the reek of unwashed hair and stale liquor.

  Sweetwater ordered the servants to lock all of the wine into the lighthouse while the women sobered up. For two weeks all of the Mainlanders were told that the immortal Siren had been cursed – a strange curse that looked uncannily like the shakes. We made a game of asking the men for cures. The disgraced women’s punishment was to try every one. Sweetwater applauded enthusiastically in the contest where the men convinced ten women to stand on one leg and affix an oyster shell to each ear. We lined them up to perform it in perfect unison. They looked like a sea-lion dance troupe.

  I spent a month in the servant’s wing teaching the scolded women proper potion making. I was a terrible teacher. I fumbled my way through complex recipes but forgot to explain the steps I had taken to get there. I am sorry to say that I had no love for the craft. I used Dahra’s lessons selfishly. I did not like to addle men’s minds. Seducing a hallucinating man seemed so close to rape that seeing women brewing those drugs made me feel ill. No, I trusted in my own senses, and in my lovers’. I knew too well how my body began to ache when there was no-one willing to share my bed. How much worse was it for the sailors, alone on their ships, or for the prisoners who had been locked in their cells? And if they weren’t at the point of desperation already, why, how lucky I was to know the herbs to take their tepid desire and inflame it!

  We were only allowed to kill the men when Sweetwater was satisfied that they had nothing left to say. She controlled this by storing all of the poisons in her tower. The old women who attended her spent their nights sweating over steaming beakers of molten salts and oils. We would be given one of the tiny glass bottles and sent on our way. It was a blatant insult, but no-one dared to confront the High Mistress about it. The old women who guarded us had spent so many years being browbeaten by the hag that they would have turned on us in an instant.

  One day, I only poured half of the poison into my victim’s wine. I watched him studiously as he swallowed it. He choked and clawed at me a little longer than usual, but he died soon enough. That night I turned the stoppered vial over in my fingers. Sweetwater would want the bottle back in the morning. She would beat me hard enough to break bone if she thought I had wasted a single drop. I found an old cosmetic jar which had rolled under my bed and carefully decanted the poison into it. It looked like a muddy raindrop rolling around in the leftover powder.

  At first it was just an experiment. I tested how little I could give them. I was always poised to tip the last drops down their throats if they struggled for too long. I knew from my own painful experience that swallowing a tiny trace of it was agonising. Without the antidote I am sure that it would have killed me.

  In twelve months I had collected enough poison to wipe out an entire village. In another year the jar overflowed, and I had to decant it into a flask. It was still a game to me, but I started to worry about what would happen if someone found so much poison hidden in my room. I took the flask to one of the marsh huts and hid it in the rotting thatch. It seemed apt to leave it in the place where I had sold my innocence – a place that nobody else cared about, and the one place in the world I would never be able to forget.

  The cave had a different pull on my heart. I fled there when I couldn’t bear the sight of my pallid face in the looking glass. The cool silence of the caves ebbed into my heart. I told myself that soon I would become as cold and content as the other Siren. I could not scrub my depravity from my skin, but the placid god made me feel clean. His weeping eyes were the only ones on the island which met my own. I lost myself in their soft gaze.

  In the summer I would strip my clothes off and stand there naked, letting the clammy air bead moisture onto my skin until even my hair was soaking wet. The drowned man’s eyes did not grow hungry, and there was no envy in his steady stare. I merely was, a thing that was neither beginning nor finished, neither wanton or innocent, and as beautiful as I was ugly.

  But as the years slid past, I visited it less and less. I was too busy, I told myself, and it was hard to disguise the grazes and bruises that scrambling through the rocks gave me. I missed the taste of salt on my lips and the cool stone against my fingertips. I missed my solitude. I longed for it, but I had waited for so long that I was afraid to reclaim it. The memory became more sacred than the actual experience, and I felt that if I dragged my sordid body into that peaceful place I would only profane it.

  Time trickled by, and I began to forget that I had once dreamed of the people who had come before me. There was only the present, and the deathly sleep that claimed me when another life had left my arms. By the time I was twenty-five, I had forgotten how to feel their loss. I sang, and danced, and barely felt anything at all.

  CHAPTER 18

  Every month, Mainlanders came to the island to collect
their dead. They crept past the pier in the early hours, and gathered by Sweetwater’s tower. Only a few Mainlanders knew the true purpose of the island, passing the secret down through the ruling families and keeping the serfs in the dark. Even when they knew the truth, most of the noblemen believed that there was something mystical about the Siren. They looked around with wild eyes, and stared at the beautiful women with desire and fear written clearly on their burning cheeks.

  Emma was often among them, with a child in tow. Before she was a lady she had been a Siren. She fell in love with a nobleman who had come to claim his murderous older brother. He promised to love her and give her a family – one of the few things that our laws forbade. Emma had already given two sons to the Mainland. She leapt at the chance to hold a baby who wouldn’t be taken from her.

  Even so, her decision to leave couldn’t have been easy. The High Mistress scarred her face and hands so that she could never change her mind. Emma had told her lover about our tradition, but when the nobleman saw the wounds on her face he was disgusted. What could he do? He couldn’t turn her away. Within a year he abandoned her for a titled heiress. Emma could not come back to the island, and she refused to humiliate herself by begging her husband to take her back.

  The Siren told each other that it was the fate of all of the Mainland women. They fell so hard that the peat swallowed them whole. We had power, and we couldn’t imagine what our lives would be like without it. We couldn’t trust in the promises of one person who told us that his love would protect us. We trusted the sea, and the rocks, and the stone that we walked upon. We trusted our sisters, and that was all.