The Warrior Who Carried Life (20 page)

Life returned to what it had been, neither better nor worse. The next spring, the reeds began to grow again along the banks of the marshes. Villagers who lived beyond the reach of the consuming Fire fearfully took canoes through the expanses of waste. The rich farmlands were singed black and deserted. Younger sons with no inheritance and some courage began to resettle them. How the fire had started, where the Galu had gone, no one knew. God, it was said, had destroyed them. Hapira Izamu Pa was shunned, and given a new name. Da Nata, it was called, which meant Emptiness, or Ruin.

In the Village by Long Water, a warrior and his supposed bride were suddenly seen to be living in the Important House. Liri Kerig, who had left the house, would not say why she accepted them, or who they were. The Old Women tapped their noses. “A tale there,” they said, and nodded. “Given only to us to understand.” Then they told their tale and no one believed them. Four months after the outlandish people came, when the last spring began to turn into summer, a child was born.

Aunt Liri was its midwife, and Cal Cara Kerig, the true daughter of the house, watched and waited in the hushed and familiar rooms that were candlelit and warm. The child shrugged its way headfirst into the world, already with fine, lank hair, and a wise and wizened face. It looked about it blinking, and coughed to clear its throat.

“Hello, Mother,” it said to Cara, in a high-pitched piping voice. Then it arched its head back, and looked over its pink and red shoulder. “Hello, Mother,” it said again. Then it pulled, and wriggled, and stepped out, walking, still attached by the cord. They saw then that it was a daughter.

Gently, Cara lifted her up. The child had a pleased, amused expression, like a wry old woman being carried on a sedan. Cara placed her on Stefile’s soft stomach. “I have waited such a long time to be born,” she said in a bird-like voice, and rubbed the moisture and buttery grease from her eyes.

They tried to call her Wisdom, or Knowledge, but Our Tongue was too crude and simple. The word, Sykantata, also meant magic, and sometimes, sex.

At three days old the child called Knowledge, or Magic could run. She ran flapping her arms, keening, naked, up and down the stone steps that led to the house.

“She can run. Let her,” shrugged Stefile, through teeth that held her pipe. Faced with the facts of it, Stefile found that she was not a mother to worry. The severed arm faithfully followed the child, lowering her down the highest steps, carrying her over boulders. “There, see? All right,” said Stefile. The child swung on the arm as though it were a branch, and walked by the river, holding its hand.

Cara spent her days at the foot of the cliff, digging the grey, baked earth. Somewhere, she knew, her father was trying to dig ground that would not break. “I’m here, Ata,” she would whisper. Syki and the arm would help, pushing flowers into the ground.

“There is a white horse in the garden,” Syki said once, climbing onto Cara’s lap. “No one can see it but me. It is standing there with big black eyes and it weeps.”

“The flowers are for her, too,” Cara said, and kissed the top of Syki’s head. She turned and looked up at Cara, smiling, shaking her head in tolerance, as if her parent had much to learn.

A week after she was born, Sykantata disappeared for a whole day. The arm returned alone, disconsolate, dragging its hand, shrugging when asked questions. Stefile marched up and down the irrigations, hugging herself, her face closed against pain, haggard and steely. It was Cara who saw the child’s return, at dusk.

A magpie glided into the hollowed-out courtyard by the doorway, and in a flurry of beautiful black and grey landed in the window of the winter stable.

“I have been all the way out of the canyon!” piped the magpie. “Down the river! I flew! I saw a very large place with three big buildings. Was that the City?”

“Syki!” exclaimed Cara, and stepped forward, and then stopped, frightened suddenly that she might scare the bird away. “Is that just your voice?” The magpie let out a joyful, mischievous chuckle and leapt down into the stable. Sykantata came running out of its dark doorway, her cheeks bulging, her eyes grinning. She spat out a single purple amethyst at Cara’s feet.

“A present!” the child exclaimed. “Magpies always bring presents. Did I see the City, Cara?”

“No. It was Canyon’s End, not the city.”

“Then I will fly even farther tomorrow. I will be a cormorant. They fly farthest of all.”

“Why do you want to go so far away?” Cara asked, wounded somehow that they had created such a prodigy, another wonder. She reached out for her, and the child laughed, and ducked away.

“To see it!” Sykantata answered. She ran to the edge of the hollow, and leapt out into the air, and there was a sudden fluttering, and she flew, as a bird.

Stefile stepped out of the shadows of the kitchen. Cara silently passed her the amethyst.

“I’ve always wanted to do that myself,” Stefile said. “Run and fly.” She watched the distant silhouette of the bird. Suddenly another bird seemed to climb out of it, and there were two of them, wheeling together on an updraft. Then Stefile asked, “Are you going to tell me, Cara?”

“Tell you what?”

“What’s going to happen.”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Explain it.” Stefile’s voice had an edge.

Cara moved like an animal in a harness it does not like. “There are threads,” she began, and lost heart for a moment, and began again. “We are made of very small threads, like weaving, one strand from the man and one from the woman, and they come together when the seeds mingle.” Her hands were pointed towards other, fingers wriggling, and she brought them together, interlocking. “That’s how we grow. Like weaving. The strands are in every part of us, half from one, half from the other.” Cara looked at her hands.

“And so?”

“And so,” Cara ducked, and smoothed down her hair, quickly, with one hand. “And so, at the end of my year, I think. I think that everything that is like a man about me goes back to what it was. The seed in my loins, and the seed out of my loins. I think that part of Syki that comes from me will go back too.”

“What does this mean.” Stefile’s mouth twitched in anger.

“I don’t know,” Cara replied, and felt Stefile’s anger gather.

The birds in the sky had divided again. There were four of them now, weaving in the wind.

Cara added: “What happens to cloth when all the warp is taken away?”

“It falls apart,” said Stefile, looking at the sky. Like a turn of a kaleidoscope, the birds divided again, and again. There was a flock of them now, calling to each other, in the sunset.

“They’re not all the same,” said Cara. There were crows and sparrows, heron and egret, hawk and pigeon. They flew screeching and cooing and hooting, in a great spiral concourse, dividing again, and again, until there was a cloud of birds, dark against the orange sky. Cara was certain of something else.

“She knows, Stef. She knows it’s going to happen.”

Stefile tossed the amethyst back at her, and stood up, hands pressed together, and went back into the house.

Stefile went to work the next day, on a doll. Silently she carved a block of wood, with deep angry strokes of the knife. She knitted a dress for it. She crushed berries to make ink, to paint eyes and a mouth on its rough head, and she took yellow thread and embroidered flowers on the dress, with quick jabs of the needle. The doll stood on the kitchen table, lopsided and lumpy, waiting for the child to return.

They found her the next morning, asleep on the kitchen floor, so small that Stefile could lift her up in one hand. They gave her warm milk to drink. “You can’t fly away from the Earth,” the child murmured. “You go very, very high, and then something stops you.” Quietly, Stefile gave her the doll. Syki took it wordlessly, cradled it to her, and fell asleep, her head on the table.

Syki said nothing about the doll, but she took it everywhere with her after that. “What’s the doll’s name?” Cara asked her once, in the kitchen.

“Hawwah,” replied the child.

“After the story in the One Book?”

“No!” said the child, as if Cara was being very stupid. “Because it’s your mother’s name.” She stirred her soup in a very adult fashion, pretending to cook. “And Stefile’s too.”

Stefile spun around from the stove. “What?”

“Your mother’s name,” said the child, her voice going thin.

“Could she know that, Cara?” Stefile demanded.

Cara raised her hands and said, “Can you, Syki?”

The child looked worried. “I only know,” she said, helpless.

“I didn’t,” said Stefile. “I didn’t know.” She lowered herself carefully onto the chair beside Syki. “What can you tell me?”

“She was called Hawwah. She didn’t have a last name. She was very small and pretty, and when she was twelve she was traded to your father, and she had three children, but she didn’t like him, so she ran away, and the dogs got her. She was fifteen then, fifteen summers. That’s all I know.”

“One year,” said Stefile. “One year younger than I am.”

There was no calendar exact enough to tell them how much time they had left. They lived as best they could. Some days they saw the child, some days not. Wading through the river, Stefile tried to snatch a fish, and there was an eruption of water where the fish had been, and the child rose out of it, shrieking with laughter. “Don’t catch me! Don’t catch me!”

“Yes I will. Yes I will,” said Stefile, laughing breathlessly. “I’m going to catch you and eat you.” The child squealed again, and ran into the reeds, and Stefile chased her into them. But she wasn’t there. Stefile knocked the reeds aside. “Syki? Stay here. Please?” There was a dart of silver, across the river. “Syki? Stay?” Stefile was alone on the mud, reflected sunlight playing on her face. Her lower jaw shook for a moment, and then was thrust forward, hard, and Stefile turned away.

In the evenings, in the kitchen, they ate without her. Stefile tried to be brisk about things. Patches of damp would suddenly open out across her clothes. “Uk. It’s my motherhood again,” she would say, and mop herself. “I feel like a spring.” But at night, she would pace the house. Cara would get up to look for her, and find her asleep on a hard kitchen chair, or in the library, amid the smell of ash, looking out of the window over the valley. “I’m all right, Cara,” she said once. “I’d rather be here. I’d rather be here when she gets back.”

Then one night, Stefile came back to the bed, and stood over it. “Cara?” she said, “Cara? There is something you should see.”

“What?”

“Syki.”

Dazed and flat-footed, Cara followed her. From down the long corridor, there came a ghostly, childish giggling. There was a light, flickering in the library.

Inside there was a small blue flame. It floated in the air, dipping and weaving and diving, and it was the fire that was laughing. It squealed when it saw Stefile, and wrapped itself, glowing, around her arm.

“I think it’s just part of her,” said Stefile, her voice dull and even. “I think it’s here to let us know she’s well.” She let the light writhe and flow about her, and brush against her ear, flickering slightly, as if nibbling it.

“It doesn’t burn. It feels like breath,” said Stefile. “It’s not like a fire at all.”

Cara could see Stefile’s face in the glow, and saw there was new quality in it. It had become heavy, as enduring and unmovable as stone. Cara feared it. Stone can break. “Come to bed,” she said. Stefile turned, and her movements had become heavy too, lumbering, like a great boulder rolling.

One day, after Syki had been gone for an absence of a week, an old woman hobbled, swaying, up the ramps of the steps to the house. She clutched the hands of two dirty, naked children. One of them carried the doll.

“Cara! Stefile!” called the old woman, in a child’s piping voice. “Come and see your great-grandchildren!”

“Who was your husband, then?” Stefile asked, arms folded.

“Oh, I didn’t need a husband,” the old woman said, proudly, straightening the silent children’s wild hair. “Or a son-in-law either.” Then she spoke to the children. “Sari, Mari, these are your great-grandparents who are many days old.”

The children sat on the steps, and Stefile tried to get them to smoke her pipe. The children looked back at her, numb and slightly uninhabited. “They’re not very good at playing,” said the old woman. “They’re shadows.”

Stefile wordlessly held out her arms to her. The old woman limped forward and settled on Stefile’s lap, nearly as big as she was, with a sigh. She lowered her ancient head, supported on leathery strands of muscle, on to Stefile’s shoulder. “Oh, Ama,” she said. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you.” Stefile rocked her gently back and forth. The old woman fell asleep. Cara and Stefile laid her out on one of the broad steps, and went to get pillows. When they came back, there was a baby in the folds of the long brown robe.

It was a real baby, nearly bald, with downy hair and a pudgy face, and no words. Stefile rocked her too, and fed her.

“Oh my aching bags,” said Stefile ruefully, as the infant suckled. “Why do you leave them so alone, ah?” The baby gurgled and grinned, as toothlessly as the old crone. Stefile began to hum to the child an old, gentle song that she thought she had forgotten, and as she sang the two silent children began to peel away. Each white flake was a butterfly, until there was a cloud of butterflies in the garden. Suddenly they clustered, fluttering, around Stefile, and rose up, and the child was gone again.

That night, as they lay beside each other, Stefile began to speak. “I feel like I’m on a rope bridge,” she said, “the kind that only has a single cord to walk across. And I have to keep very calm, and look only straight ahead, and not look down. I just have to keep walking, straight ahead.”

Summer ripened. It got too hot to work outside during the day. For fun, Cara tried to teach Stefile her four spells. Stefile stood over the stove, making clicking and clacking noises in her throat, and chuckling. The embers remained cold.

“There’s no need,” Cara said. “The world doesn’t want it.”

“I don’t. Not in this heat. You try.”

Cara did, making the Spell of Fire, and nothing happened. “Ah, well,” she smiled. Like a cold dew, realisation settled over her. The magic was going. She was not a great sorceress any longer. The realisation grew, in silence, filling her days, filling the house, one more unspoken thing.