A Novel (4 page)

I frowned, feeling again that sense that the earth had wobbled beneath my feet. “I don't know,” I said.

“Isn't that where you work?” he demanded, masking his unease with a contempt with which he was more comfortable.

“It's not there,” I said. “I don't know what happened to it, but it's gone.”

Sinchon's face set, but he said no more and left.

The inner room was just big enough for a bed and a stove, and the latter had been loaded with coal. It was stiflingly hot, and the air was vinegar sour with sweat. The midwife, kneeling between Rahvey's splayed legs, shot me a look as I came in and snapped, “Close the door! You're letting the cold in.”

There was no cold, but I did as she asked.

At the head of the bed, Rahvey looked surprisingly placid, but when her eyes flicked to mine, her face fell instantly.

I was not the sister she had been waiting for. I never was.

“Pass me that towel,” said Florihn, the midwife. I squatted beside her, but kept my eyes on the wall. “About time you were having one of these yourself,” the woman added.

I had seen her around the camps for years, coming and going with bloodstained napkins and buckets of water. She lost no more babies than was usual, and had birthed me seventeen years ago, but I had never taken to her. I suppose I imagined the midwife's disappointed announcement of what I was when I had first emerged bawling from my mother. Another girl. I could not, of course, actually remember the moment, but I was sure it had happened, and a small and spiteful part of me hated her for it.

And there was one thing more: My mother had not survived my birth. She had heard me cry, I was told, had held me for a while, but she had lost too much blood, and nothing Florihn had been able to do could save her.

Third daughter, a curse.

So, yes, though the idea made my stomach writhe with the injustice of it, when I looked at Florihn, I could not stifle a pang of guilt.

“Any word from Vestris?” asked Rahvey.

Our idolized elder sister.

My heart skipped a beat at the thought of seeing her.

“We sent to her,” said Florihn, not looking up, “but haven't heard back yet.”

“She'll come,” said Rahvey, lying back. “For the naming, if not before. She'll come.”

It was a statement not of hope, but of faith.

I was not so sure. Vestris was twenty-five, eight years my senior, which was enough to mean that we had barely grown up together at all, though my earliest memories were of her—not Rahvey, and certainly not my devoted but illiterate father—reading to me. She had found work at an ambassador's residence while I was still small. There she had attracted the interest of men far beyond our family's caste or social station. Our mother had been, I was told, a beautiful woman, and while both Rahvey and I had inherited something of her looks, it was Vestris who drew people's eyes. In my childish recollections, our eldest sister had been a figure of exquisite and mysterious appeal, and as her social setting improved, so did the wealth of her clothes. She was a society lady now, and her appearance in the Drowning was greeted with the kind of reverent excitement people normally reserved for comets. Rahvey worshipped her.

“Look at this,” said Florihn to me, pointing between Rahvey's legs. I forced myself to look, though I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing.

“Is that right?” I managed.

Florihn gave me a smug smile and seemed to wait on purpose, as if driving home my ignorance. “I guess books don't teach you everything,” she said.

The learning my eldest sister had passed on to me had always been something of a local joke, especially considering what I had opted to do with my life.

Florihn was giving me an inquisitorial stare, and eventually I shrugged.

“Yes, it's fine,” she said at last. “But there'll be no baby today.”

“I came because I thought it was happening
now.
”

Rahvey said nothing, but gave me a defiant look.

“This is a time for family,” said Florihn piously. “You'd know that if you spent more time here.”

I blinked. They didn't want me around. Not really. They just wanted me to feel bad for not being like them. I felt the certainty of it like a stone in my boot that I couldn't shake out, a constant irritant that might one day make me lame.

No wonder I preferred life up on the chimneys, alone in the sky.

“I have to go back to work,” I said, rising. “Has anyone…?”

I hesitated, and Rahvey gave me a blank look this time.

“Has anyone been to the cemetery?” I asked, my voice carefully neutral.

Rahvey turned away. “We've been a little busy,” she said, her voice managing to suggest an outrage she didn't really feel.

I nodded. “I'll go,” I said.

“Of course you will,” said Rahvey. And this time the bitterness was real.

 

CHAPTER

3

ON THE EAST SIDE
of the Drowning was an ancient, weather-beaten temple teeming with vervet monkeys and fire-eyed grackles. It was as close to leaving the city as I ever got, a kind of halfway house between the urban sprawl of Bar-Selehm and the wilderness beyond. By day, an elderly priest burned incense and chanted among the weed-choked altars for whoever put a copper coin in his bowl, but by night, the little shrines and funerary markers were haunted by baboons and hyenas. For a city girl like me, it was unnerving, but I had no choice. Two years ago, my father's remains were buried here.

Papa.

He was a good Lani, a good father, a kindly, brown-eyed giant of a man, quick to grin, to play, to tease. I had loved him with all my heart, and I missed him every day.

“I'll always keep you safe, Anglet,” he had said. “I'll always be there to look after you.”

The only lie he ever told me.

I was already grown up when he died, already working, but till then and in spite of everything I went through in the Seventh Street gang, I had never felt truly alone. Papa had always been there, a buffer between me and my sisters, my work, the world in general, ready with a touch, a word, a smile that calmed my raging blood, dried my tears, and told me that all would yet be well. Always. He was my rock, my consolation, and my joy. When Papa looked at me, the universe made sense, and all the words the others hurled at me fell harmless at my feet or blew away like smoke.

He died in a mining accident with four other Lani men. He was trying to reach two apprentices who had been trapped by a rockfall, but the new passage they opened released a pocket of gas. There was an explosion. It took a week to get to the bodies after the shaft collapsed, and I was not allowed to see him. His remains were burned, as is our custom, and the ash strewn over the river, save for one fragment of bone that was interred in the hard, dusty grounds of the temple.

Two years to the day.

I have been alone ever since. I believe the two apprentices were found unharmed.

Tanish came with me to the grave, eyeing me sidelong and careful not to make noise. Partly he was trying to show respect, but it was also the place that left him subdued. He had seen enough death for one day. I would have told him to leave me to my thoughts, but a family of hippos had taken over the riverbank below the temple, and a Lani woman had been killed by one of them when she went to draw water only a couple of weeks before. I didn't want him wandering alone, so I let him hover awkwardly at my back as I found the marker and knelt down, sitting on my heels.

Someone had placed crimson tsuli flowers on the grave, bound with gold cord. They were fresh and lustrous, hothouse grown at this time of year. Expensive.

Vestris.

It had to be. I felt a quickening of my pulse as I sensed my sister's presence, and my eyes flashed hungrily around the graveyard as if she might still be there. But she was gone, and my disappointment felt suddenly shameful. Deflated, I adjusted the flowers and focused on the stone marker, feeling young and alone.

Family is family.

Except when it's gone.

I said nothing, feeling the coin I wore on a thong around my neck.

All steeplejacks wore something that connected them to their past. It was a claim to a version of yourself that wasn't about the work. Berrit's had been his sun-disk pendant. Mine was an old copper penny Papa gave me. It had been misstamped and bore the last king's head on both sides. The Seventh Street boys thought I kept it for luck, because I could flip the coin and always guess correctly what would come up, but I didn't. I kept it because Papa gave it to me and because when he did, he said, “Because it's rare. Like you, Ang. One of a kind.”

He thought I was special. I wasn't, but he believed otherwise, and that almost made it true.

Now I turned the coin over and over in my fingers, and the face embossed on its twin sides became his in my mind so that I pressed it to my lips and closed my eyes like a little kid who thought that wishing might bring him back.

I had never lived in Rahvey's house, but those refuse-blown streets with the sour smell of goats and the stagnant reed beds by the river were all too familiar. Whenever I went back to the Drowning now, all I found was what was gone, the spaces Papa had left behind him. No wonder I hated the place. It was a land of ghosts, of absences.

I had learned long ago not to cry, no matter the hurt in your hands or your heart. Tears in the city gangs meant fear and weakness, and they were punished without mercy. I knew that, and I knew that after this morning, Tanish needed me to be strong.

But this was hard.

Harder than I had expected. It had been, after all, two years. The grief at first, coupled as it was with shock and horror, had been almost unbearable, but over the subsequent weeks and months, it lessened. In my childish imagination, I figured it would continue to fade, like a distant ship sailing beyond the reach of vision until it disappeared entirely. But it hadn't, and I saw now, kneeling on the sandy dirt and staring at the roughly carved stone that bore his name, that it never would. I would always be straining to see him, reaching for him, and he would never be there. I would carry his absence like a hole in my heart forever.

I remembered Berrit, a boy I had not known, who died on Papa's anniversary, and a single tear slid down my nose and fell onto the dusty earth as if I were watering a tiny seedling. I wiped the trace away before turning to Tanish, who was gazing about him, looking glum and a little bored. He had not seen.

I laid a fistful of wild kalla lilies on the grave next to Vestris's tsuli flowers and set my face to meet the world, but as I half turned to Tanish, someone called.

“Anglet!”

I recognized the girl as one of those who did errands for Florihn, the midwife. “What?” I called back, though I knew what was coming.

“It's started!” cried the girl.

*   *   *

I FOLLOWED HER TO
Rahvey's house, where Sinchon was sitting on the porch, scowling. As I approached, a roar of agony came from inside, a woman's voice—though one so pressed to the limits of human endurance that I heard no sign of my sister in it. I didn't speak to Sinchon, but yanked the door open and stepped inside.

It was even hotter than it had been earlier, and Florihn, crouching between my sister's legs, shot me an irritated look when I entered, as she had the first time. At the far end of the bed, Rahvey's red, glistening face was a rictus of pain.

As I set my things down, she began to scream again, an unearthly, animal sound like the weancats that prowled the edge of the Drowning when prey in the hinterlands was scarce. I winced, the hair on the back of my neck prickling, but Florihn just grinned.

“That's right,” she said to Rahvey. “You cry it out.”

As soon as the contraction passed, I said, “I thought there would be no baby today.”

From her place between Rahvey's legs, Florihn scowled at me, then refocused on Rahvey and said simply, “Now.”

It took no more than five minutes, and I kept my gaze locked on my sister's face for as much of it as possible. When the baby emerged, I did as I was told, but I couldn't stop staring at the child.

It was a girl. The fourth daughter.

For a long moment, no one moved or spoke. The baby wailed over Rahvey's exhausted panting, and I just looked at it, registering the awful truth, so that for a few seconds, it seemed that time had stopped.

At last the midwife seemed to come back to herself. Her face was ashen, but she brought her fluttering hands together and pressed her fingertips, a gesture of composure and resolution, both hard won.

Then she stood up and took a deep, quavering breath. “Where's my knife?” she asked.

“Wait,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Cutting the cord,” said Florihn. “What did you think?”

Rahvey gaped, her eyes flicking to the midwife for guidance.

“Then what?” I asked.

There was a moment's stillness, then the baby began to cry again. The midwife wrapped the child in a towel and set her on the floor before turning on me and speaking in a low whisper. “Fourth daughter,” she said. “You know what that means. Rahvey can't keep it. It goes to a blood relative or we take it to Pancaris,” said Florihn.

Pancaris was an orphanage run by one of the Feldish religious orders—dour-habited, grim-faced white nuns who raised children to be domestic servants.

“Till she runs away and turns beggar or whore,” I said, looking at the brown, wriggling infant, so small and powerless.

“There's no other choice,” said Florihn dismissively. “And they'll teach her what she needs.”

“Like what?” I asked.

Florihn gave me a hard look for my temerity, but she answered. “They'll teach her to scrub. To cook. To wield a pick or wheel a barrow. Anything else is just making promises you can't keep. You of all people should know that.”