Blood Ties (24 page)

After all the lies, he could still recognize the truth: she was driven by a long, twisted hatred. “So to revenge yourself on them, you try to kill Martine, one of the old blood?” He shook his head. “Your revenge has a mercenary tinge to it, I think.”

For the first time, she was shaken. Her certainty quivered like wind on water. Then her mouth firmed. “I know enough to know that I can only look after myself. That is a lesson you will learn, boy, out on the Road with no skills and no guardian. You will remember. You will regret this.”

She opened the door and walked into the slanting downpour. The wind blew in and rain drenched the rug.

Martine shut the door and put the knife down on the table, then took him by the arm and led him to the small fire. She built it up until the flame shadows danced on the ceiling.

He couldn’t stop shaking. The sweat on his face was drying and it stretched his skin taut. There were raindrops hissing down the chimney and sputtering out. He noticed the smell of lavender, wood smoke, wet wool, cha, for the first time. Martine’s long hair swung low as she stooped to the fire. She held a mug to his clenched teeth. Cha. The scent loosened his jaw and he sipped once, twice. She put the mug into his hands and he held it awkwardly.

Martine sat at his feet and cast the stones.

“Foresight. Liberation. Understanding. Pain,” she said. “And the blank stone. That means anything may happen from now on.”

Doronit’s Story

I
T’S TRUE
my parents were Travelers by blood, but they were as settled as can be by nature. I was an only child, raised outside a small town way down past Turvite toward the Wind Cities. My father was a cowman for the biggest local farmer; my mother acted as evening dairymaid so the farmer’s wife could get supper for her brood of children.

It was a happy childhood, I suppose, but a lonely one. None of the local children were allowed to play with me, the “Traveler brat.” They threw stones but I learned to dodge them. I wasn’t so skillful dodging the mud or the cow dung. If they’d come at me one by one I could have fought back, but they never did. I used to straggle home and just stand in the doorway until my mother saw me. She would get a look on her face. I thought, the first time it happened, that it was a look of exasperation with me, tempered with resignation at the work I made for her. I hung my head, but she chivvied me over to the fire and changed my clothes, speaking gently so I understood that it wasn’t my fault, and cheered up.

Later my parents bought their own cow, and a few goats, and I had the keeping of them. I hated it, but what was the alternative?

The spring I was sixteen, I was walking down the lane toward our cottage, bringing watercress and some young nasturtium leaves from the stream nearby for supper. I was brooding over my life, the way you do when you’re sixteen and think you’re unhappy, and I didn’t hear the horse come nosing up behind me until it was too late. I heard soft hoof noises on the gravel and then a snuffle and I turned, but the warlord’s man was off the horse already and had hold of me a moment later. I knew him by sight and by reputation — violent, crazed almost, but one of the warlord’s favorites. His name was Egbert, but they called him Fist. He was grinning at me.

What’s the point of describing it? There aren’t any words for the terror, the despair, the loneliness of it. He pushed me facedown into the spring mud until it was in my mouth and my nostrils, until I could hardly breathe, and took me from behind. Both passages. Grunting, “Traveler bitch, scum, whore, turd, filth . . .” And when he’d finished he got up, kicked me once in the ribs, got back on his horse, and rode off.

All I wanted to do was lie there and die. Then I started to vomit and I had to get up on my hands and knees to retch.

But you don’t die, that’s the worst of it: you have to stand up and stagger back home, walk in and see the look on your mother’s face. I’ll never forget her face that day. It was like the look she had given me each time I had come home covered in dung, but now I was old enough to read it. It wasn’t just her immediate comprehension and the horror. There was a kind of humiliation, as well, and a giving in, a submission to our situation, to the position of Travelers in the Domains, an acceptance that nothing could be done, no justice could be expected. I knew in that instant that someone had once forced my mother facedown in the mud. Strangely, I was angrier about that long-ago violation than I was about my own, and that anger stayed with me and kept me from crying.

She stood for a moment, frozen, then came and cradled me and stripped me, and heated water and made it scalding hot, too, and made me sit in the bath, and drink the small amount of applejack my father kept behind the oats crock, and chew on some rue, while she washed my hair and my hands and crooned over me and urged me to cry, to let it out, let it go. I couldn’t, though I wanted to, if only to make my mother feel better. I knew what she was trying to do, with the heat and the herbs and the liquor. But hot water and rue don’t always work, and there wasn’t enough applejack to make a squirrel sick, so three weeks later I knew I was pregnant.

“It’s your own fault,” my da said. “You shouldn’t have been walking down that lane alone. You know that the warlord’s men think Traveler girls are fair game.”

“What’s she supposed to do?” my mam said. “Never move out of doors?”

Her voice was gentle, though, and I couldn’t be angry with him, either, for I’d seen him weep all the tears that I could not on the night it happened, standing, staring at the fire for hours, his hand clenching and unclenching, and that look on his face, too, the one that says: “I need to do something about this but there’s nothing I can do that won’t make it worse.”

I hated the thought of the baby, of course, hated it with nausea and headaches and not eating, but it was a strong one and it clung onto life. Then one day I was out combing the goats for their fleece and I felt it move. I’d been dreading it, that moment, knowing it was coming, knowing I’d feel this product of rape inside me. I’d been waiting for it in horror. But when it came the touch was so soft. Tiny. Innocent. Completely innocent. How could I hate it?

My mam had said, “If you hate this child he will have ruined two lives.” And I knelt in the straw of the goat shed and cried, remembering, accepting, coming to love. And I did love her, my darling, when she was born, loved her with all there was in me to love, my sweet-skinned, milk-scented, beautiful black-haired Larch, loved every bit of her from her fat wrists with the crease across them, to the incredible softness underneath her toes. Is there anything softer than feet that have never felt the hard ground? My parents loved her too; Da took a while, resenting her on my behalf, but when she held out her little hands to him and grinned, how could he resist?

So it went on for seventeen months, and the only change was that now the women in the market spat as I passed and said “Traveler whore” out of the sides of their mouths, even though my da had told the story abroad, and they all knew where the baby came from. I grew a shield on my heart, in that time. Inside were Mam and Da and Larch, outside were all of Acton’s people, all the rest of the world. But it was only for protection, so I wouldn’t care about the spitting and the curses. I didn’t hate them, then.

In the early spring the warlord and his men raided the territory of the Wind Cities, in retaliation for raids they’d made on us the year before. It happened every year or so, and people had forgotten who had started it. I loved the spring raids — it meant all the warlord’s men were away and I could go wherever I wanted to. It was the only time of year I was really free. But this year they brought back a fever with them, a plague they said was striking all the Wind Cities. Of course the warlord’s men brought it back, but there was a Traveler family that had come to town from the north at the same time, a young tinker and his wife and twin baby boys, and the townsfolk blamed them for it. One of the babies had a fever, they said.

It went through the district faster than any other disease I’ve ever seen: whole families died in a couple of days. It was a swelling sickness, with great black boils under the arms and in the groin, and those who were stricken couldn’t keep anything down. The district battened down and people huddled indoors, praying to the local gods (but when had they ever cared about humans?). We did the same, but it was too late. The farmer came down with it after an imprudent trip to market in the next town (he was hoping it hadn’t reached there yet, but he was wrong). He came by on his way home to discuss the sale with my father. Da got sick two days later, and Mam that night. Then Larch.

I couldn’t care for them all myself, but I tried. Larch didn’t have it too badly, at first, and I hoped, gods, I hoped, that she would come through, as some had. Mam and Da needed more than I could do for them. They were bleeding at the gums, and the boils had started under their arms. It happened so fast. One hour I thought they’d be all right and the next they were screaming, begging for water, sweat pouring out of them as though they were water sprites hauled onto dry ground.

We got our water from the farmer’s well, and I dared not leave them long enough to fetch it, but finally I had to. When I got to the farmyard, the gate was bolted shut against me. I put down the buckets and yoke to undo the bolts, and the farmer’s wife appeared in the doorway, red-eyed, with a pitchfork in her hand.

“Get away from here, you Traveler bitch! It’s ’cause of you and your kind that my man’s dead and my children like to die! Get away from our well!”

I was aware of the fine summer morning, the sweet air, the chirp of starlings, a rustle in the grass . . . and the woman, staring at me with a hate that had always been in her, sleeping, until now. That was the moment I found out who I was and what I could do. I didn’t care what she thought, or felt, or said, or did: I needed the water and I would take it across her dead body if I had to.

I climbed the gate, with her still screaming and waving the pitchfork, and opened it from the other side, picked up my buckets and moved to the well. She came at me with the fork. As if I’d practiced it all my life, as if I were one of the warlord’s men, I stepped aside and hit her in the midriff with the bucket yoke. She folded up onto her knees and started to cry, but I ignored her. I filled the buckets, picked up the yoke and took the water back to my family.

By the time I got back Mam and Da were dead. I blamed the farmer’s wife, and I still do, not for them dying, because they were bound for death, but for robbing me of their last moments, for making them die alone. If she hadn’t bolted the gate it would have taken me only a few moments to fetch the water and maybe I’d have been back in time to ease their passing.

But my Larch was alive. She was hot, but she wasn’t bleeding at the gums or pouring with sweat. It was the first stages. Sometimes, I’d heard, if the disease was caught early by the healer it could be eased — for those who didn’t develop the pus-boils it was the fever that killed. I knew there were herbs that could lower fever. I didn’t know what they were, except for feverfew, and we’d used all of that we had.

I decided to go to the healer in town. I carried her in, three miles and a bit, her body burning against mine, her little arms trying to hold on around my neck. Oh, that is the true feeling of motherhood, those little arms around your neck. I could feel her grip getting weaker and weaker and I hurried in response until I was running.

Every shop and house was barred and shuttered, even the healer’s. I banged on the door and shouted for help until a window opened above me and the healer leaned out.

“What?” he said.

“My little one’s just got the fever,” I said. “No pus, no bleeding gums. Can’t you help her? Bring the fever down so she’s got a chance?”

“There’s not enough herbs to go around for our own people,” he said, and closed the shutter.

I thumped on the door again and again, but he ignored it. So I carried her back home, giving her as much water as I could along the way, and looking for feverfew beside the road, but there was none left anywhere. I took her out to the goat shed, away from the death inside the cottage, and I nursed her there. I bathed her body with cool water, spooned it into her mouth, and fanned her to keep her cool. But it was no use. She vomited the water up as soon as it went down, and the sweat started to stream off her as the sun went down.

If I’d had the herbs, help from a healer, she might have lived. Since then I’ve seen others live with fevers just as bad. She was dead before morning, in the still time when the tides of night change and the stars burn more brightly just before they begin to grow pale. She died with her little hand clutching at my shirt. When it loosened and fell away, it was like the world fell away too, or I fell from it, into darkness deeper than the sea.

I don’t remember those first hours. My next memory is of standing next to the graves I had dug and filled in. The other dead of the town would lie in the burial caves, but I knew better than to ask that for Traveler scum.

It was getting on for sunset, three days after my parents had died. I hurried back to the cottage so I could be there when they quickened. I closed the shutters so I could see them better when they arrived. I’d always been able to see ghosts, like my da, but it didn’t happen too often, apart from the ghost of the draper that haunted the well in the town square. I’d never been to a quickening, but my parents had described them to me. So I waited in the dark room, my heart beating fast, and they came. Their forms gathered on the beds where they had died, their faces still contorted with fever and thirst. Then they moved their heads, looking around, looking for me. I came forward and they saw me and smiled.

I’d thought my heart was numb, but it wasn’t. It was full of heat and tears and acid. Yet I couldn’t cry. “You are dead,” I said.

Mam nodded, Da looked surprised, then saw Mam, misty and frail, and he sighed noiselessly. They reached hands toward each other and turned back to me. I couldn’t cry. There was something I had to say.

“Look after Larch,” I said.

Grief flowed into their faces and Mam reached out a hand to me. I felt for the first time the touch of a ghost on my cheek, that chill drift just under the skin. Then they faded.

A day later I sat in the goat shed and waited for my baby to come back to me. I made sure I was sitting in exactly the place I had been when she died. She came gently, her little body seeming to nestle into mine as it had so many times. She tried to clasp my shirt, but her hand passed right through. Then she sat up, surprised, and tried to touch my cheek, but her little hand slid through again. Then she got frightened and her face crumpled into silent tears.

“Oh no, little one, don’t cry,” I said, “please don’t cry, talk to Mam instead.”

“Mam,” she said. “Want Mammy!” And she tried to grab hold of me and couldn’t and cried out — “No!” — and her voice was the terrible voice of the dead, the stone-on-stone grating that the rock on the burial caves makes as it’s rolled back. I’d just wanted to comfort her, to stop her soundless weeping. I didn’t know then that it was possible to make ghosts speak. “Mam!” she cried, and reached for me again and then she faded.

I ran. I ran from the sound of that voice coming from my sweet girl’s mouth, its emptiness and pain. I ran out of instinct to the forest, as though being hunted, until I was exhausted, until I could no longer hear the desolate voice, until I sank down and passed out.