“What’s wrong with your eyes?”
“I was ill as a child. The illness marked them.”
“Did the illness change your skin that color, too?”
How unusual, to be singled out because of my color. It was not a situation I was used to. I replied slowly. “Where I come from, most rishi look like me. Aosogi, some call this, though bayen with the same pigment like to lighten their skin and make it more fa-pim by calling it fawn.”
“Fa-pim, gah! Who wants to be like the Emperor? Bayen are yolkbrained.”
Fwipi clucked her disapproval but the girl ignored her, then crouched down beside me. She studied me a moment, frowned, then pointed at the worn garment she was wear ing.
“This is a yungshmi.” She spoke with exaggerated care, as if I were from the north and spoke Xxelteker. “Yungshmi, yungshmi. You shouldn’t hide in that ugly sack, no, no.”
“I prefer my bitoo,” I replied, lips slightly numb from the root I chewed, the pain in my ribs turning sludgy and dull.
She shook her head as if I were simple.
“Yungshmi,” she slowly enunciated. “I’ll help you change into a yungshmi.”
She leaned forward and shyly touched my hand. Her teeth were not yet chipped and pitted from sucking slii, though her lips bore the telltale black stains. “You don’t want to look like an Emperor’s woman, hey-hey.”
She got to her feet, thrust out her potbelly, and strutted about, feet splayed.
“I Emperor!” she boomed in imitation of the Archi pelagic warlord. “I big fat Emperor! I hide my women in sacks, like eels in baskets.”
The children around her giggled. She turned, waggled a finger at me, and, crossing her eyes, announced, “To my eyes, you look good in eel sack. Good, good! Tasty eel!”
“Enough, Savga,” Fwipi said sharply. “Tansan, you tell this greatchild of mine to guard her tongue. A reckless mouth breaks bones.”
Murmurs of agreement from the elders of the clan. I looked to where Tansan sat on the barracks stairs, nursing her babe. Three young men were crouched about her feet.
She lifted her chin. “Let her speak the truth, hey.”
Anger spurted through me. I couldn’t help it. Tansan was my age, had a healthy babe pulling at her breast,
and
was the mother of the precocious six-year-old beside me; she had a prudent mother, a clan, and not one admirer but three, and there she sat, above and separate from the rest of us, slighting the possibility of danger that might come be cause of her daughter’s words. Tansan had things I had lost or never had, and might never have, and that, along with the memory of her condemnation of my life, stung.
Too late, my emotions went straight to my tongue. “You would let your girl speak and risk her being punished for it?”
Tansan looked at me with an expression of maddening amusement. “I think it was you who were comparing the Emperor to your piss just now.”
“I’m an adult; I know the consequences of what I say if I’m overheard. Children are vulnerable—” My throat was suddenly thick. I continued hoarsely. “A good mother gives her child guidance, protects her.”
Tansan’s dark eyes flashed. “You think her tongue isn’t at risk of being split with a holy warden’s ax when
you
speak ill of the Emperor? I don’t know where you come from, Secondgirl, but here, any within earshot of perfidy share the slanderer’s punishment.”
An uncomfortable silence settled over my new clan. Tansan and I were staring each other down . . . but I was having difficulty not being distracted by the wet sounds of the babe suckling at her breast.
A small hand tentatively touched my shoulder, and I al lowed my attention to turn from Tansan to Savga.
“You’re angry at me?” the young girl asked, sloe eyes dark beneath a furrowed brow.
“No.” And then, fully aware of the effect my actions would have on Tansan, I gripped Savga’s little hands in my own. “How can I be angry at you? You are bright and amusing and pretty, everything a friend might wish for.”
Savga’s eyes widened. “Really? We’re friends?”
I could
feel
Tansan stiffening where she sat upon the stairs.
Looking only at Savga, I solemnly nodded and said, “I hereby promise that I, Kazonvia, will be a most impressive foremost friend to Savga of the arbiyesku Xxamer Zu.”
Savga beamed, then withdrew her hands from mine and clasped them together in delight. Looking a little smug, she territorially patted my head for all the other children to see. “Friends,” she said. “Me and Kazonvia are foremost friends.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Tansan fluidly rise to her feet and disappear within the barracks.
My surroundings were plunged in the smoky gray of pre dawn. A thatch roof was above my head, and the silhouette of a woman was crouched beside me, a white scar gaping across her mottled jawline in a parody of a grin.
I cried out and jerked away. Pain cut across my ribs. With the pain, memory flooded back, and I recognized the fig ure before me. She was the scarred Djimbi woman who’d declared my life debu, cursed. Tansan. She was squatted beside me, studying me as if I were a snake she was unde cided whether to milk for poison, decapitate, or dismiss as useless.
In the murk of dawn, her eyes seemed to suck in all shadow, so that they were black as venom. The fine, rounded bones on either side of the hollow of her throat flared into the smooth straightness of her collarbone, sup porting shoulders, biceps, and arms that seemed shaped not by a rough life of communal agriculture and poverty, but by some sculptor who worked with stone as warm and dark as teak to create only beauty and magnificence.
Her eyes glinted as mine locked on hers. “Leave my daughter alone, debu Secondgirl. Understand?”
The hoarseness of my dry throat helped me match her even tone. “She strikes me as one who makes her own decisions.”
Tansan rose to her feet. The easy stance of her curva ceous hips, the strength that resided in perfect balance in her generous proportions as she looked down on me, lent her immeasurable unconscious grace. It was also clear she had iron at her core, and the timbre of her voice as she spoke sent a tremor through me.
“It was my milk that gave Savga life. Nothing you say or do can change that. Where’s
your
children?”
She turned and walked away, as supple and relaxed as if I weren’t watching, and left through the crooked woven-jute door. I wanted to leap after her and stand with legs braced and eyes blazing and inform her that I
owned
this Clutch, by damn. I was not a debu secondgirl; I was Zarq-the-deviant, the infamous rishi via who had openly defied Temple.
Broken ribs, a body as stiff as a day-old corpse, and the need for absolute anonymity kept me immobile on my back.
As I lay there, seething, women began stirring about me. They rolled up their mats, diapered babies, woke children, braided hair. Gritting my teeth, I tried to sit. Impossible. I felt the blood drain from my cheeks as pain from my frac tured ribs torqued about my torso. I closed my eyes and lay there for what seemed like only a short time, gathering the will to attempt rising again, but I must have drifted into sleep, for when I next opened my eyes, the gray of predawn had been displaced by full light, and a child was sweeping the barracks floor beside me, frowning at me for my sloth.
Whisk, whisk!
her broom went, flicking at my feet like the tail of an angry boar.
Biting the inside of my cheek, I forced myself to roll over. Struggled onto my knees. From my knees onto my feet. Stood there swaying a moment, wishing for milky maska wine to dull my aches, or even more of the foul root I’d chewed the night previous.
Or, ideally, dragon venom.
A cool hand touched mine, and I looked down into the canted gaze of Savga, Tansan’s daughter.
“Foremost friend, you can lean on me to walk. Here, like this, yes?” She draped my arm around her slim neck and smiled up at me, uncertain, eager.
I regretted my rash impulse the night before. It had been wrong to promise her my friendship, wrong to use a child’s trust to irk her parent.
“I don’t need your help, Savga. Many thanks.”
Hurt crossed her face, replaced by stubborness. “I’m strong enough. Come on, you’ve missed breaking fast with us already. Fwipi-granna says you should watch us work; she sent me to fetch you; now come
on
.”
She tugged; the movement hurt, and I could have swat ted her for it. Instead I clenched my jaw and minced across the barracks floor, using her small body as a crutch. De scending the rickety wooden stairs to greet the early morn outside bathed me in sweat and left me breathless.
Having eaten and performed whatever ablutions my new clan deemed necessary after rising, the arbiyesku was gathering for the day ahead. The women with young in fants were unraveling a portion of their yungshmis from their waists, draping them slinglike across their breasts and settling their babes within. The slii fruitstones everyone sucked clitter-clacked against molars. Fwipi had Tansan’s infant strapped in a sling upon her back, and she greeted me with a pursed expression that I took for a smile. No one else so much as glanced at me. I hoped it was because they were too focused on their day ahead, and not because I’d alienated them with my impetuous rebuke to Tansan the night before.
As a group, we approached the dragon cocoon ware house, me embedded in the middle of a group of children, Savga still acting as my crutch. The dragonmaster was amongst us, looking as surly as a gharial with an abscessed tooth. The front of his tunic was plastered to the wound on his chest and he walked slowly, unevenly.
The smell of the warehouse was thick and oily in the morning’s heat. Sun-bleached grassland stretched away from the warehouse in endless undulating miles, until some where in the indiscernible distance, sky swallowed savanna. Termite mounds and tussocks of spikeweed knobbed the ground.
Two massive wooden doors riddled with holes stood be fore us. The arbiyesku split in two, approached the doors, and, with much concerted effort, began heaving them open. The ground beneath my feet reverberated as the great doors shuddered and rolled reluctantly aside.
At once, the smell of death billowed out of the ware house.
How foul was the stench! So much stronger than I had expected, and it reeking bad enough before the doors had been opened. It was as powerful as a fist in the gut and sand in the eye, and let me tell you, such a smell imprints itself on a person for life, so that ever afterward all scents seem but a component of it: cloying, meaty, musky, as rancidsweet as spoiled grain.
I staggered back, but Savga shouted, “Come closer, look, look!” and the children surged forward, carrying me with them, propelling me into my new livelihood and the stuff of nightmares.
Those involucres.
They oozed waxy gray exudate; they undulated with mag gots. Mound after mound of them, some shoulder height, some only as high as my belly, all of them jammed against one another, disappearing into the back of the warehouse. And the sounds: the crunchy scurry of carrion beetles, the drill-buzzing of a million flies, the hiss of gases escaping the bodies of the living dead dragons, and the deafening rumble of the doors grating open . . .
“Outside!” I cried, trying to turn around and escape the tide of children, but no, I couldn’t swim out from their un dertow, weak and in pain as I was.
“Look!” Savga squealed. “Those are our carts. Those are our churners. Those are our trowels! And see, along that wall? Our hashing scythes!”
So fine,
she wanted me to say of the things she’d called churners, the baffling, upright contraptions standing senti nel along one wall, and of the blades of the oversize scythes dangling from the wall like hung men.
“You come over here and watch,” she ordered, and the tide of children pulled me toward those vicious scythes as the adults streamed into the warehouse and headed toward the tools of their trade.
“Stand here,” Savga said, propping me against a wall, out of the way. “I’ve got to work.”
The mournful lowing of a dying dragon reverberated from the back of the warehouse. My skin broke into coldpimples. Plangent and sepulchral, the lowing tolled again.
Images flashed across my mind, memories of senile old bulls stretching snouts to shafts of sunlight on a cool morn in the convent I’d once lived in. I recalled their slow shiv ers of delight, remembered how they liked to be rubbed around the roots of their olfactory plumes, how they’d grunted in pleasure, their sad amber eyes upon mine. Flick ers and blazes of dragonmemory licked over my vision: I re membered my cloaca stretching thin as paper as I strained to lay my first egg, remembered the bewildering agony of undergoing wing amputation as a hatchling.
Ancestral memories, those, shared during the bestial rite.
Dragons were wise and divine, yet they were enslaved beasts of burden. Dragons were predominantly aerial crea tures, yet we shackled them in barns and forced them into the yokes of wagons. I felt ill with dread anticipation of what I was about to see, yet I knew that the involucres con tained not live dragons, but carcasses, and that whatever was about to occur had been occurring for several hundred years, and that dragons suffered and toiled during life on our behalf so that we lowly mortals might have food and shelter.
Grace. They favored us with divine grace.
Though I had a feeling that what I was about to witness wouldn’t contain much grace at all.
One day I’d change how dragons were treated in my Clutch. I would. But for now I could ill afford to draw negative attention to myself. So I would remain silent, and watch whatever was about to occur to the involucres, knowing that someday, somehow, the dragons would live a better life under my rule, and their dead would be honored when encased in their cocoons.
From the gloom where the apparatus of the arbiyesku trade hunkered, women pulled forth carts while children dragged out massive shovels, the likes of which I’d never seen before. The carts the women pulled were heavy and cumbersome, built to be pulled by satons. As some of the women labored to station the carts in a large semicircle near the open doors, others lifted down the massive scythes from the walls and walked, alongside the men of the clan, into the darkness of the warehouse.
My eyes strained to follow them. I found myself lean ing forward. There was the dragonmaster, weaving his way through the rows and rows of immobile living dead, his eas ily identifiable bald pate bobbing in the gloom. Now and then he stopped and pressed an ear against an involucre, bending stiffly because of his wound.
The arbiyesku continued to fan out throughout the ware house, checking the involucres, their scythes glinting high above their shoulders. They shouted information to one another as they paused and listened to each cocoon, and soon an apparent consensus was reached, for the arbiyesku formed a line midway through the warehouse.
Men and women alike hefted their great scythes from their shoulders. Breaking into song that sounded more dirge than melody, they began rhythmically swinging their blades and moving slowly, steadily, through the cocoons, the dragonmaster amongst them.
Cracking, watery sounds. Sickly, warm odors. The line moved slowly toward the waiting carts, hacking, hewing, creating spills of maggots, deliquescing flesh, and kerati nous membranes.
My heart pounded hard against my larynx.
The children hitched heavy ramps to the waiting carts and waited for the ichor-streaked men and women to reach them; when they did, the adults handed them their scythes, and the children promptly took them outside and began slashing the blades through wild grass to clean them. While the children were thus employed, their parents approached the line of ominous contraptions standing sentinel not far from me. Churners, Savga had called them.
The things were upright wooden devices, my height, looking for all the world like double-armed pumps situ ated on top of boxy wooden platforms, which in turn were stationed above stout casters. As the old men wheeled the things forward, the axle of one broke with a loud crack of wood and clank of metal. There was much swearing as the churner was moved out of the way and tipped onto its side. Metal blades shone beneath the exposed underbelly of the boxy platform.
In pairs, the rest of the adults stood upon the churn ers, on the platform stationed above the blades of each. They began pumping the handles up and down, up and down, which propelled the churners forward. Like fran tic oversize bugs they bumped and rolled over the mess of slashed involucres, churning them into a gray lake the consistency of gruel.
The children returned from outside, scythes polished clean by twists of wild grass. They hung the blades on the wall nearest me—Savga grinned and waved—and took up massive wooden shovels: two children per shovel, or, in the case of the smallest children, three or four to each. The wooden scoop of each shovel was over four feet long, knee high, and slightly concave. Into the mess of churned cocoons the children waded, and they began pushing the paste created by the churners straight up the ramps they’d earlier hitched to the back of the carts.
At some point I went outside to lie down, my body a blinding ache. Savga found and woke me.
“Your skin is the color of a roasted kidney,” she said so berly. “You’re going to suffer evil sun-sickness tomorrow. That was witless, falling asleep without shade. You’re not crackbrained, are you?”
“Water,” was all I could croak for a reply, whereupon I fainted.
I woke to cool, wet sensations tickling my forehead. I opened bleary eyes. Fwipi was bent over me, dribbling wa ter from a rag onto my forehead and lips, upon my wrists, over my groin.
“How’ll you get better if you do this to yourself, hey-o?” she muttered.
She pressed a gourd of water to my lips and cooed en couragement while I drank. She helped me stand, her body all sinew and bone, as tough as bark. Holding me about the hips, she led me back to the women’s barracks.
She didn’t come into the barracks but stood instead at the foot of its rickety stairs, gray paste hardening upon her calves.
“We’ll deliver the fodder now,” she said. “We’ll be back sometime after dusk, then clean the carts and clothes be fore eating. You know how to weave mats and baskets? You do that until we return. Make plenty baskets, plenty mats.”
“Deliver fodder?” I asked stupidly.
“Yes, yes. Brooder feed.”
She was talking about the pulped involucres. The mess was destined for brooder consumption. Dragon would eat dragon.
Bile rose into my throat.
“Make plenty mats,” Fwipi ordered, pointing to a pile of jute strips stacked to one side of the barracks stairs.
Mercifully, I was then left alone.