Sugar and Other Stories (13 page)

Outside again, she embarked on the real business she had come
on. There was an old woman from whom she had once had a charm to keep yellow worms from the bitter melon roots, and from whom Da-Shin had had something else, he later confessed. An old woman who knew about certain things. She had lived then in a minimal shelter of canes and flat leaves, with a wooden dish in front of her for offerings and various skin bags and linen bags propped against her squatting haunches, containing her secrets. In those days which now seemed far off, like a fairy tale, the days of Da-Shin and the running blood, A-Oa had looked at this woman with a mixture of repugnance, fear, and something approaching pity. A-Oa was a good housewife: she loved the things she had, her solid stone walls, her perfectly bright cooking pot, the blade of the hoe with which she cleared her ridges of plants so that nothing noxious should poke its head above the soil, or spread leaves or tendrils out of place. The old woman, in her flimsy hutment and her dry black cloths seemed unnecessary, waste, fragile as the fine black disintegrating films left when paper or cloth had been burned. She walked round the outer wall of the Temple, expecting mostly not to find her. But there she was, shelter, begging bowl, skin and linen bags, resting lightly on the earth almost exactly where she had been in the days of Da-Shin.

A-Oa squatted in front of her and put a handful of seeds into the bowl. Be well, Mother, she said, and, the years have spared you in well-being. The old woman rustled and shifted a little, creaking. Her face was fine dark skin stretched over bare bone, working its way out, mapped with finest lines, delicate as veiling, with no flesh or fat to thicken. Her eyes were gone into her head, black and reddened, the stubby row of lashes white ghosts on mahogany. I remember you, she said to A-Oa in a thin voice. You wanted the possible and the impossible. You wanted a secret thing and also the death of the yellow worms. I hope the worms do not trouble you. A-Oa said that the worms had vanished as though they had never been. The old woman sucked her lips and said, “And now you want other knowledge.”

“I want a charm against dryness, mother,” said A-Oa. “I am
dry through my whole body, like a smoked fish.”

The old woman fumbled in her clothes and produced a limp lemon and a triangular blade. The skeletal dark hands sliced into the fruit flesh on the wooden bowl: the old mouth twisted and fumbled and spat on the segments. She turned and turned the segments in the bowl, and then handed one to A-Oa.

“Bite,” she said. “This will tell if the juice of your body has dried up, like a failed spring, or been sucked out by a witch, to have power over you. Bite and tell me exactly what happens.”

A-Oa bit, inhaling the warm rind: under her tongue saliva welled, not much, but some, not as she remembered from her youth, the gush of human water at the very sight of the sharp yellow shining globules. Even the thought of a lemon on a dry day could once bring such a rush of liquid. Now the thing itself alleviated, no more.

“There is water, but not much.”

“As I thought. If there was true water, the charmed lemon would have it running out over your chin. You have lost your true water. Your blood also is dried up?”

“For many months.”

“Bring your face nearer. My sight is poor.”

A-Oa leaned forward, so that her head was under the shelter, her brow under the canopy of the black hood. She could smell the other’s breath as it curled from her nostrils, an incorrupt smell, dusty, spicy, airy. She could see the lines cut in brow and lip, the purple-black sunk curves of the eye-sockets. She cast her eyes down and did not meet those others, whose whites were yellow, whose huge iris was coal-black, whose rims were reddened.

“You have red eyes,” said the old woman. “A jinx has ways of replacing juices: there are magics you could learn, if you are willing, if that is what you want.”

“I have always lived quietly and properly. I have had four sons, whose life was sucked out of them before it was theirs. I have kept my garden well and my house is clean. My husband is gone and I have no one to live for; also no one who would be unhappy if
tomorrow I fell and died, or began to rave as She-At did some years ago, until the village cast her out and stoned her. I have no respect in the village. I have no sons to care for me when I am old and weak. Every year will be a little worse. To know your knowledge, Mother, that would be some help against what took my sons, against my state.”

“Knowledge must be paid for,” said the old one. She put out no hand, and may have been talking about life, not money. A-Oa, however, brought out three coins from her waistband and laid them beside the pool of lemon juice in the wooden trough, from where, in the deft flicker of a long hand and the twitch of a fold, they vanished into the old woman’s clothing.

“These things are necessary,” said the old woman. “You must set up an altar and put on it some things I shall tell you, that you must find, and some things I shall give you. You must wait until all moisture has parted from the things that have moisture, and the dried things are plumped out. Then you will have power over wet and dry, to heal or, if need be, to harm. You will be respected and feared. Unless you come against some more powerful magic.”

Various people watched her come back through the village, in silence, in the simmering heat. Kun stood in the shadow of his house, with a crescent of glistening sweat on the curve of his belly. His eyes moved with her passage; his lips were pursed in his peevish frown. The children scattered. Everyone in the village knows almost everything about everyone else. She had the pieces of root and fibre, the dusty dried beans, black and crimson, tucked away in her long skirts. In her own house the kitchen was dark and earth-warm, cooler than the street outside. The fat hen ran in importantly to greet her, chucking quietly, shaking dusty wattles. Its bright golden eye peered at her out of the tipped side of its face; its red flabby comb nodded. She put on water for tea, and lit the candle in front of the little altar behind the stove, the house-spirit’s own altar: the other altar must stand invisible from
the window, behind the vegetable jar, the other side of the stove. In the roof, in the mouths of sacks and jars were various other charms, tied bunches of quills and twigs, fur and seed pods, to propitiate nameless little demons or wandering spirits.

She made tea, and broke up a sweet rice-cake, sitting on the ground with her back to the window, staring at her knives, her chopper, her strainer on the low table. The hen bustled round her, making a great business about the odd rice-crumb, rattling companionably in its throat. It was a good layer, the hen; it took care of its own visits to Bo-Me’s noisy cockerel. It was only infrequently broody — it tended to abandon its eggs in various places A-Oa knew about and rush back to the kitchen to supervise the chopping of the supper vegetables, to pick up strayed grains. A-Oa considered it: one of the old woman’s requirements was an egg about to hatch but unhatched, an egg with a chick curled inside it which must be left to rot and go beyond rotting to dryness. That was not so easy; she might be reduced to thieving other women’s unhatched clutches, she who had always kept herself to herself, correct and virtuous. It was a thin time for chicks, the height of the dry season. Also required was a lash-snake, a wiry poisonous, fast-moving pallid worm that struck from under stones in field pathways and was best avoided. For that reason A-Oa knew where some of these were, or had been. Da-Shin had known how to trap them with a forked stick and a noose. He had showed her how, though she had never done it. They had sat shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the pumpkin-field, setting up the contraption and the bait, scarcely breathing. She remembered the quick twist of his wrists in the sun, the line of his spine above his squatting haunches, the smell of his male sweat drying quickly, the heat stirring between them. She would try to catch a lash-snake: it was safer than paying boys. The other things were not so bad to acquire: certain organs of a large desert rat still relatively easy to catch even in this sparse time, one which she could either catch or naturally buy from the boys for her supper. Certain combinations of seeds. She sipped her tea and
considered ways and means, not as though she any longer had a choice, not, in a way, as though she herself were there any more with her passions and her irrelevant needs and hopes. She had a task, a place in the world again. She would have to steal the egg. She could wait months and months for the fat hen to decide capriciously to sit again. It might never do so. Even when it did sit, it was not notably successful in rearing chicks. It produced eggs in plenty, which was A-Oa’s reason, or excuse, for not snapping its neck and putting it into the pot.

When the charms were assembled, neatly laid out in their little dishes, A-Oa had a bad time, a sultry, transitional time of terrible smells, corruption and deliquescence whilst the egg rotted, exploded and fell away, whilst the desert rat’s entrails pullulated and squirmed, whilst the stiff hoop of the lash-snake went puffy and pimply and then fell into desiccation. It was imperative, the old woman had said, that no one should touch, move, or disturb the relations of these components of the charm whilst the drying went on, and that no one but A-Oa should set eyes on them. That was easy enough: no one came into her house, no one was curious, except perhaps Kun, and Kun was a man, and, as such, prohibited from ever going into a woman’s part of the house. Male children until they were two years old could be with their mother in the kitchens. After that they were kept out, beyond the sliding door, or woven hanging carpet, or rush curtain, depending on the wealth of the house. So no one came into A-Oa’s kitchen during the days of rotting and drying, which were long and troublesome, in which she slept badly and had terrible dreams, of demons circling in the air, of Da-Shin lying smashed on the rocky foothills of the mountains, his belly blown in the sun, of fire crackling in the trees in the village meeting-place on the plain, where they came at certain seasons of the moon to dance, and drink, and sing and stumble, and lie where they fell, in the warm dark, a man freely feeling for his neighbour’s wife, an untouched girl for her sister’s husband, for at these times they
were filled with spirits, not themselves, not the children of their house, nor the property of their men, nor prohibited from touching their men’s male relations, father or brother, under pain of death. The kitchen became full of the smell, it hung in the fine smoke and permeated the oil of A-Oa’s hair, it inhibited the hen, who stayed in the rest of the house, squawking crossly. And then after its time, it went, and there was quiet dryness. The egg was chalky shards of shell, burst by escaping gases, fallen away from fine bones and undeveloped quills and the curved beaked skull. The snake was papery dry scales over the fine humps of vertebrae in their curled chain, fragile eye-sockets, and needle fangs from which the palate and mouth had shrunk. The rat parts were a brown stain, no more. Whereas the wrinkled dried beans, crimson and black, had plumped out, were glossy and round, and the strange dried vegetable-flesh the woman had given her, spongy mushroom heads or hairy root-tangles were fat and soft and springy, resuscitated. The ghost of the smell hung over all, as for days the smell of burning may, in a kitchen where there has been an accident with the fat, a sheet of sudden flame and black fine cinders.

It became widely accepted that A-Oa was a jinx when she cured the running sores on Bo-Me’s son’s legs. It was also of course accepted that A-Oa had caused these sores, had started to suck out the child’s life through the sores, through the daily thickening yellow pus on which flies gathered. Bo-Me spoke very casually to A-Oa one day at the edge of the tank, addressing her respectfully for the first time as “Mother”. “My Cha-Tin is sickening, Mother,” said Bo-Me. “There are wet wells on his legs and he is shrivelling away. I have asked everyone for advice and no one has been able to help me. Do you happen to know of any remedy I might try?” Bo-Me knew, and A-Oa knew, that to a close friend, a mother or a sister, Bo-Me would have said that some witch or jinx was attacking the child with her thoughts, or with spells. But she answered in kind, that she had various remedies her mother
had taught her, it might be that one of them would prove helpful. Bo-Me should bring the child to her house at dusk. When he came, walking painfully, his sharp little face fearful, A-Oa made Bo-Me wait outside the kitchen whilst she took the boy in and touched his stick-legs with various bunches of fronds and put a mixture of mashed bitter herbs and spiderweb, about which all the women knew, on the bubbling places. She reached down into one of her tall jars and pulled a pickled lime from its darkness. “Eat this,” she said. “It will bring the water back to where it should be, under your tongue.” The boy stared at her with dark, serious eyes. “Thank you, old one,” he said. “It is nothing,” said A-Oa, and took him back to his mother. “He will get well now,” she told Bo-Me, and he did.

Then there was Di-Nan’s diarrhoea, which she cured with a seed-pellet and the instruction to walk four times round the periphery of the village from left to right and four times in the other direction. There was a pig of Ta-Shin’s, that wouldn’t eat, that lay on its side making self-pitying moans, which, grown confident now, she cured simply by predicting that it would stand again, if it was starved for two days, on the second day, and should be fed three hours after it stood. She had respect: grandmothers brought her small gifts of preserved fat or cooked rice: she was greeted deferentially in the streets. “Go well, Mother.” Something had happened, but it was neither what she had hoped for nor what she, more obscurely, waited for, with a fear like a hot stone inside her. Then the boy came, Bo-Me’s second son, not the tiny Cha-Tin but the beautiful, gleaming Cha-Hun, his long black hair plaited down his spine and moving like a bright snake as he shook his head. He was a young man, not a boy, A-Oa saw, as he sauntered past her door, the muscles of his buttocks standing out, and his stomach hard and small and taut. When he had gone past, casually, casually, he came back, even more casually, and leaned on her doorpost, glancing quickly into the dark inside of her house.