A Novel (5 page)

I looked to Rahvey, but she kept her eyes fixed on Florihn, the way Tanish stares at me to avoid looking down from the chimneys.

“Rahvey,” I said, dragging her gaze to my face. “Maybe there's another way. Maybe this fourth-daughter business can—”

“Can what?” demanded Florihn.

“I don't know,” I said, quailing under the woman's authoritative stare.

My sister gaped some more, at me this time, then looked back to the midwife. She squeezed her eyes shut, and a tear coursed down her cheek. Her grief gave me the courage I needed.

“Maybe we could keep her,” I said, feeling the blood rise in my face.

Florihn blinked, but she maintained a rigid calm. Her eyes became two slits as she considered how to respond. “‘We'?” she said, staring me down. “What will your contribution be to raising an unseemly child? Where will you be when your sister has to raise more money to feed another mouth?” When I said nothing, she added, “Yes, that's what I thought.”

“Sinchon could look for a different kind of job,” I said unsteadily, but Florihn, reading the panic in Rahvey's face, cut me off.

“And you'll tell him that, will you?” she demanded. “You have forgotten everything. This is our way. The Lani way.”

Then it's a stupid way!
I wanted to shout, an old rage spiking in my chest.
You should change it.

But faced with Florihn's baleful glare, I couldn't get the words out. Rahvey looked cowed, but her eyes wandered back to the mewling infant. I moved to the child, stooped, and gathered her inexpertly into my arms.

“Put it down, Anglet,” said the midwife. “You are only making things harder. This is not helpful. It is cruel.”

I avoided her eyes, crossing to my sister with the child.

Rahvey gazed up at me, and beneath the exhaustion and hesitation, I thought I saw a flicker of something else, a faint but desperate hope.

“She looks like you,” I said, finding an unexpected smile.

Rahvey took the baby with trembling hands, moving it to her breast. The crying stopped abruptly. My sister tipped her head back a fraction and closed her eyes.

“Three daughters only,” Florihn intoned. “Blessing. Trial. Curse. The fourth is unseemly.”

“Florihn?” Rahvey said, gazing at the infant now.

“Look what you are doing to her!” said Florihn, seizing my arm and turning me round. “You don't live here, Anglet. You don't belong here.”

Anger flashed in my eyes, and she let go of my arm as if it were hot, but then her face closed, hardened.

“We will give the child up,” she said. “That is the end of the matter.”

“Florihn?” said Rahvey.

The midwife turned to her reluctantly, her expression softening. “What do you need, hon?” she asked, sugar sweet.

“Maybe,” Rahvey began, like a woman inching out over a narrow bridge, “if we explained to Sinchon and the elders that we could raise her, maybe they would listen.”

“No,” said Florihn, so quick and hard that Rahvey winced, and the midwife had to rebuild her look of simpering benevolence before she could proceed. “I am the elders' representative here. I speak to and for them. We cannot allow our traditions, the beliefs handed down to us from our grandparents and their parents before them, to be trodden underfoot when they do not suit our wishes.”

“The world changes, Florihn,” I said, amazed at my own audacity. “The things we assume will last forever go away like the Beacon.”

“That is the city,” said Florihn. “That is not us. The Lani must stand by their ways. No mother can have four daughters.”

“Perhaps Vestris would help?” said Rahvey. “She's rich, connected—”

“Do you see her here?” snapped Florihn. “Your precious sister has not come to see you for how long now?”

Rahvey said nothing.

“You should forget her as she has forgotten you and the place where she grew up,” said Florihn.

I bristled at this, but kept my mouth shut.

Rahvey, meanwhile, seemed to crumple inwardly and, as she began to weep in silence, nodded.

“But she is still your daughter—,” I began.

“The matter is closed,” said Florihn. “I suggest you leave us to our ways, Anglet. You aren't Lani anymore.”

“
What?
” I exclaimed. She had said it like it had been on the tip of her tongue for years and she had waited for the necessary anger to say it aloud. The accusation awoke a new boldness in me. “Look at me!” I said, sticking out my arms. “Lani through and through. Like the people I have worked with every day since I left the Drowning.”

“Steeplejacks!” Florihn sneered. “What kind of work is that for a Lani?”

“Common,” I replied.

“Urchin work,” she shot back. “City work.”

“Compared to what?” I returned, fury sweeping away my usual diffidence. “Growing a few onions on the edge of a swamp? Mending pots and pans? Peddling folk crafts to people who think they're quaint? Panning for gold in a river of filth?”

“I will not defend our customs—our heritage—to a … a
kolek
!”

Even in her rage, she had to steel herself to say the word. A kolek is a type of root vegetable. Its skin is brown, but the flesh within is white.

If she had not been three times my age, I would have hit her.

She saw me flinch and a flicker of cruel satisfaction went through her face, spurring her on. “But you are not even a kolek,” she said. “If you were, the chalkers would treat you better. You are not one of us. You are not one of them. You are not one of the blacks. You are nothing, and your opinions mean nothing here.”

I reeled as if struck, and the sensation was not just anger and outrage. Her words were a match touched to the powder in my heart, and now it blazed with a hot and poisonous flame: a part of me thought she was right.

There was a long, stunned silence while I gathered my thoughts, and when I spoke, it was quietly and with conviction. “I will take the child,” I said, thinking suddenly and painfully of Berrit, who the world had already forgotten. “She is beautiful. She has been born on the same day Papa was taken from us. She should not grow up unwanted.”

The room fell silent again.

“You?” asked Florihn.

“Yes,” I said, sounding more sure than I felt.

“By yourself? With no husband?” Florihn pressed.

“What use has Sinchon ever been in the raising of your family?” I asked my sister. She looked away. “I will come for her tomorrow, but you can tell the elders that you want to keep her. Make them talk about it. If they won't change their minds—” I faltered, but only for a second. “—I will keep her. And if I can't, there is always Pancaris.”

Florihn stared, her mind working, and Rahvey watched her, wary and unsure, like a cornered weancat.

“Tomorrow?” my sister repeated.

“Yes.”

Rahvey looked pale, uncertain, suspended between feelings, but when she felt Florihn's eyes on her, she nodded.

“This requires a blood oath,” said the midwife, picking up the knife. “You must swear by all we hold true and precious. Hold out your hands.”

I stared at the knife, and the scale of what I was doing crowded in on me so that for a moment I couldn't breathe. “Not my hands,” I said. “I have to be able to work.”

“Your face, then,” said Florihn, her eyes hard. “There may be scarring.”

I blinked but managed to shake my head fractionally. “It doesn't matter,” I said.

“Very well,” said the midwife with a tiny, satisfied smile. “Kneel down.”

I did as I was told, feeling the quickening of my heart, as if the blood that was to be let were rising up in protest.

“Anglet Sutonga,” she intoned, “do you swear you will take this child, this fourth daughter, from your sister Rahvey and raise her as your own or, failing that, find suitable accommodation for her, so that she grows up in a manner seemly and fitting for a Lani child?”

I opened my mouth, but the words didn't come out.

Florihn's eyes narrowed. “You have to say it,” she said.

“Yes,” I managed. “I swear.”

And without further warning, Florihn slashed my cheeks with her knife, first the left, then the right.

The edge was scalpel sharp, and I felt the blood run before the pain sang out, bright and hot. With it came shock and a sudden terrible clarity.

What have I done?

Florihn methodically took up one of the towels she had brought and clamped it to my bleeding face, gripping my head tightly and staring searchingly into my eyes for a long minute.

There was a knock at the door.

“Can I come in?”

Sinchon.

“In a moment, sweet,” said Rahvey.

“Just tell me,” he demanded. “Boy or girl?”

The three of us exchanged bleak and knowing looks.

“A girl,” Rahvey answered heavily. “We will keep her for tonight, but Anglet will come for her tomorrow. I'm sorry.”

Sinchon said nothing—expressed no sorrow, no commiseration with his grief-stricken wife, nothing—and moments later, we heard the outside door of the hut slam closed as he left.

Florihn was still clamping the towel to my face, pressing hard to stanch the bleeding, and I felt a flare of rage that, for the moment, burned away any doubt that what I was doing was right.

 

CHAPTER

4

“WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR
face?” asked Tanish, ashen.

“Nothing,” I said, flustered. “Come on. I need to get back to work.”

He looked injured by my evasion, so I hugged him matily and tousled his hair till he fought to get free. He watched me as we walked, not believing my playfulness, but I didn't want to tell him what I had promised. Saying it outside the hot little hut would make it real, and I wasn't ready to face that.

“Think you can get us back into the city without the Beacon to guide you?” I asked. A challenge usually took Tanish's mind off whatever was bothering him.

“Easy,” he said, bounding ahead.

The city—which is to say the colonial city, the original native settlement having been co-opted and assimilated almost three centuries ago—sat on a hill above the ancient river crossing, its municipal buildings rising stately and imposing, pale stone tastefully trimmed and fluted. It had been built on the promise of prosperity and power derived from luxorite, the same luxorite Rahvey's deluded husband still panned for in the Kalihm. That promise had long since faded and the city had sprawled in other directions, but it was luxorite that had brought the first white settlers.

Luxorite, when first mined, glows far beyond the shine of other precious gems or metals. It has an inner light so potent that a fragment no larger than a grain of sand is as bright as a candle. A few grains together, or a piece such as you might mount in a finger ring, might light a large room in the dead of night. At its mature best, a piece of luxorite is too bright to look at directly, a hard, white light tending to blue that produces sharp-edged shadows. In time it degrades, its light softening and yellowing to amber, but that takes decades, and a single stone might light a wealthy mansion for generations.

A thin seam of the stuff had been exposed by accident on the edge of the river hundreds of years ago. The Mahweni, the black hunters and herders who lived there, treated the place as magical, but eventually began to trade fragments of it for the ironware being worked in the north. Soon settlers came for the luxorite, not because it was beautiful—though it was—but because it was useful, and for a time, it lit their mines and factories as well as their extravagant homes.

But the seam was soon exhausted, and though tiny pockets of luxorite were found nearby, nothing like the expected quantity ever came to light. Soon what little had been mined took on once more the aura of the magical. It was beyond precious. The mines and factories were plumbed for gaslight, and their luxorite sold for more ostentatious use elsewhere. Now, the discovery of an aged grain whose yellow light might fuel little more than a hand lantern would feed a family for several months, but that happened so rarely that the price of the mineral was one of the most stable of all traded commodities in the region. The piece that had been the Beacon was not just priceless; it was also irreplaceable. There was no new luxorite in Bar-Selehm, and the city's heart now was industry and trade. The Mahweni who had shown the white settlers the first seam now wore overalls and fed coal into the city's steam engines and factories. And so Bar-Selehm evolved.

It took Tanish and me twenty minutes to leave the fetid sourness of the Drowning behind, and as much again to enter the city proper. We didn't have money for the underground so we hopped a ride on the back of an oxcart for a half mile, slipping down when the driver turned toward the Hashti temple on the edge of the shambles. Tanish loved that, and I, pleased by his delight, managed to push away any thoughts of Papa; of the boy called Berrit, who had died exactly two years after him; and of the blood oath I had just taken.

Twenty-four hours from now, you will have a child to take care of.…

Beyond a dull dread, the thought meant almost nothing to me, an idea spoken in a foreign tongue.

Well,
I thought unhelpfully,
you'll find out.

We walked another half hour, feeling the city grow up around us till the sky became crowded with offices and shops and the world seemed to constrict. I would take the anonymity of the city over the provincial watchfulness of the Drowning any day, or the savagery of the wilderness beyond it, but its hardness and gloom were undeniable.

“I'm going to go and get my tools,” I said. “Maybe get an hour in before it's too dark.”

“Morlak will be at the shed,” said Tanish warningly. “You might not want to see him today. He was in a bad mood this morning to begin with.”