“Can’t give her over, Ram,” Mag says, pinching her face up, staring down her nose at Greeb with an air of smug confidence. “I got two claims here. Two! Mixed up in some kind of magic and can’t figure to break them apart. I give him a pick from the next raid.”
“I want this one,” Greeb yells at her, puts a boot on Rimma’ ribs and kicks her to her side on the stones. Rimma climbs to her knees, eyes cast down, hair a white waterfall over her face. I can’t see her expression, read her emotions. Her body shakes, muscles rigid, terrified or livid, I can’t tell. And I still don’t understand what Mag means by our magic, that we’re linked, inseparable. We’re twins, mirror images, but not the same, hardly the same.
“The light-benders?” Ram asks Mag.
“Nah,” Mag replies. “Other magic. You give him one, I lose both. I’ll give him another. Next time.” She waves a dismissive hand at Greeb and hangs on her staff, wincing and muttering, “Fucking back.”
“She’s lying,” Greeb growls and spits in her direction. “There’s one. I’ve only ever seen one. Rimma, Angel, she can call herself the fucking devil if she wants, but there’s only one.”
“Two,” Mag barks.
“Anyone aside Mag seen two?” Greeb shouts with a mocking sneer.
“Bring Shy,” Ram calls out to the crowd.
The cook-fires crackle as we wait, the sun sinking behind the bloated clouds girding the mountaintops. The wind blows close to the ground, fanning the fire and flicking motes of dust, ash, and ice at my face. The circle opens for Shy to enter, her old body hobbling, huge eyes in her misshapen head peering first at Rimma and then at me. She beckons to me with a cupped hand, pointing to the ground beside Rimma. As Mag does, she sees us both, perhaps through the Touch of enhanced vision Rune described to me. And what does it mean that only those Touched by magic see me, see us?
Her face close to ours, Shy studies me, blinking, then lifts Rimma’s face, eyes searching my sister’s features unmoved by the rage I witness burning beneath her skin. Mag cackles softly though loud enough for Greeb to catch her mirth. I hear his heavy breath, the guttural growling in his throat. Sloot twitches and licks his lips at the edge of the fire.
When she finishes with us, Shy faces Ram. “There are two.”
“Are they light-benders?” Ram asks.
“No.” She shakes her pointed head. “They are inseparable, identical, but not the same.”
“Explain, Shy,” Ram says gently.
“They have different souls.” She points at Rimma. “This one is dark, the other light.”
Laughter blurts from Mag’s mouth, her argument won.
“I claim this one,” Greeb shouts at Ram. “If that means the other…”
Ram’s hand flies up, silencing the dispute. “Thank you, Shy. You may return to your rest.” As Shy leaves the circle, I remain kneeling beside my sister, our judgment deliberated by Ram, the two of us somehow entwined in unknown magic, our fate shared. He swivels his head toward Mag. “What were your plans for the doves?”
“Sell them at the North Tradepost. As
doves
.” She pinches her lower lip between thumb and finger, eyeing Ram suspiciously as if she anticipates what’s coming. Greeb bites his tongue, a sly smile tugging at the corner of his lip. Sloot snickers, rocks his hips and grunts.
“My judgment,” Ram says, the finality in his tone brokering no debate. “You will sell them at the auction, Mag, and give half the prize to Greeb. Until then, you will keep them safe. No spite. No burning.” He eyes Greeb. “They’ll be auctioned as
doves
.”
As the gathering dissipates, I sag back on my heels and sigh. “Nothing’s changed,” I whisper to my sister in disbelief. A hand to my beaded ear, I almost laugh at how relieved I feel—that we’ll
only
be sold as slaves to a stranger, someone who’ll fuck us, impregnate us, and work us against our will.
“Something’s changed,” Rimma says, looking straight ahead. “Greeb can bid high for us, knowing he only needs to choke up half. Greeb’s going to win the bid.”
15
~Rimma~
“In a broken world, I suppose everything is relative,” Angel muses. She lounges on the steps of the once House of God’s Law, leaning back on the column where Rune trussed me after Mag roasted me alive. “In Heaven we lived in perpetual summer, our climate unchanging and therefore of no relevance to our daily lives.”
“Huh,” I offer as an opinion.
“Our introduction to seasons happened in the late summer,” she explains, “when the world was sliding into autumn and winter, so to our
unseasoned
eyes it seemed a gradual decline with the only outcome death.”
“Interesting.”
“It never occurred to me that a broken world might reawaken and grow again.”
Spring is the point of this lop-sided conversation. The world spins gradually green with sprouting grass, unfurling leaves, cheery yellow flowers by the hundreds, and a shitload of bugs. The bugs fly up my nose, into my eyes and down my throat. They sting and itch as they crawl up my trousers. I fucking hate them.
Despite the bugs, the warmer days are welcome. I wearied of freezing fingers and toes months ago. Now a white sun blazes in a cloudless sky, pinking our skin, and I want to bathe more than I want to breathe. The stench of my blanket, my clothes, my armpits sickens my stomach. My hair hangs lank and gritty, my skin streaked with grime.
Angel’s voice drones on in the back of my head, “Can you imagine the world—”
“Would you ask Mag if we can bathe in the stream?” I ask, interrupting her. “And wash our clothes.” I’ve behaved myself, but the old crone hasn’t forgiven me for Greeb’s claim. Mag and I mix like water and oil. She employs her magic or the edge of her stick if I’m too slow at my chores or frowning too much or giving her the “evil eye.” I’ve learned the hard way to avoid her if Angel will do my bidding.
An hour later, Rune, Bones, and Dooly leave for the sunny stream with all the doves. Except me. I bathe in the barn’s cool shadows under Mag’s watchful eye, shaking with cold once again.
“Ram says I gotta get you sold, and you’re damn fool enough to run off,” Mag mutters, hanging on her stick by thin, sinewy arms, boney hip thrust out above her twisted leg. “You and Angel might be twins on the outside, but you’re the sun and moon otherwise. Angel and Devil just like Shy say. Might not get my cart, giving Greeb half.” She spits through the toothless gap in her brown teeth. “Nothing to say?” she taunts me.
“Nothing, Mag. Just washing.” I scrub at my clothes in a bucket, kneeling naked but clean on the straw, clenching my teeth so they don’t rattle as I shiver.
“Think of this,” she says. “Could’ve been rid of me, rid of Greeb for good. Rid of all of us River Walkers that come here and saved you. Might of had a fresh start with some other pack, woman of a powerful man, maybe with some say of your own. Could’ve given that Angel a safe and happy place maybe for her to live out her life. Nah, but you blind your eyes to all the good People here and the hope in most the faces. You don’t see children playing, don’t notice them smiles in the women’s faces that are carrying, don’t get how our ways might be the best we can do in this damned broken world.” She points a gnarled finger at me. “You steal and defy and dare Greeb with your almighty looks like you begging him to fuck you.”
“I never begged him to fuck me,” I shout at her, my fists cramped, clutching my clothes in the cold water.
“Pah!” Mag flaps a wrist at me. “People been fucking for centuries, longer than that, since time began. No one’s gonna fuck old Mag, that’s for sure, probably snap me in half. But most people got an urge for it and most know how to get it if they want it. I lived long enough to know it bright as day. Don’t you try tell me your kind didn’t fuck in this Garden, ‘cause it’ll be another damn lie to yourself.”
My thoughts flash to the rooftop, to my teasing and kissing with Max, our longing for fornication, his impatience. I remember my parents’ last night together in the library, bodies entwined as if there was nothing else they’d rather do with death pacing at the door. I don’t want to hear it, to think about it, about Biters fucking me.
“It’s not the same, Mag,” I cry out, furious. “No one tried to rape me.”
“Lucky you,” she sneers. “I’ll wager there was raping here. Pretend all you want about your laws and holy ways, don’t mean it didn’t happen. Angry men been raping women since day first dawned. Rape is all about power, and guess who got power over a scrawny thing like you?”
If I could wring her neck, I would. Instead, my hands twist the life from my scrubbed clothes, and drape them over a stable wall. They’ll require hours to dry while I wait here in the dark. With a fresh bucket of water, I immerse my blanket, drowning my misery.
Three rapes in Heaven, three banishments. Those, the ones I know about. Plus the coercive rape of my mother by Deacon Abrum…how many others?
“All sorts of People out there,” Mag lectures onward. “All sorts of angels and devils, kind and cruel. All types of broken too, some you see and some stay tucked away where eyes have no business. You think the world and people is one way. You hate us all, Dove, you ain’t gonna have a life worth a day of living.
“I haven’t a choice.”
“More choice than you think,” she hisses at me. “You think I got a heap of choices? You want to swap lives? Trade bodies? Pretty dove like you?”
“I’m a slave. Owned,” I shout.
“You’re fucking alive,” she barks back. Done with me, she lurches out the door into the sunlight. I pound my blanket in the bucket, wring out the brown water, scour the filth from the only thing in my life within my control, my pathetic blanket. With every last ounce of my strength I twist out the last drops and hang it beside my clothes. Clean.
With a sigh, I reach for my blouse. I’ll wear it wet and sit in the sun. A pitiful choice I can make. I pull it off the stall’s boards and discover it’s dry.
**
Tears squeeze from Angel’s eyes as we trudge from Heaven, weighted down with packs of food, leading a string of bleating goats, our charges for the weeks-long trek to the North Tradepost. Those too ill to travel and without anyone to bear their weight, we leave behind with the Biters’ old women. If any of them survive, the pack will collect them on their return south.
No tears water my cheeks, my emotions a squalid swill of ambivalence. Heaven wore the sweet face of my childhood, replete with moon-eyed innocence. I’ve buried her memory one piece at a time in our bone wall, beginning nearly a year ago, the day Paradise burned, then in the snow of winter when I dug in the earth for ancient bones. Only my father’s grave strums at my heartstrings; the man dead before my memory of him tarnished.
Our journey carries us west, tracking the dribbling stream that Angel and I once called a river. The sky is luxuriant blue, the ground solid clay, packed hard, tufts of grass and stalky flowers scrabbling for life from a mosaic of cracks. Occasionally a new trickle of water merges with our creek, running in tortured cuts through the earth. Bordering forests of ash and alder, scraggly white saplings march thirstily across the open land.
After three days of walking, our stream spills into a real river, a wild tumbling whitewater bucking over submerged rocks at the shoreline, too deep and fast to cross at its center. Somewhere on the far side lies Sanctuary, if its shield wall still stands, if the Biters haven’t laid the Garden to waste. Gazing over the sweeping tumult of water, I think how intolerably naïve I am to have thought for a moment that Sanctuary was within my reach. I don’t even know how to swim.
North of us stands a bridge, a sight I can’t picture in my head, despite Rune’s description. I imagine a metal balcony suspended between tall stone columns, the whole thing impossibly precarious, teetering in the wind.
“You’re right about them falling,” Rune informs me. “The bridges down by the sea have mostly broken up, big gaps in the middle where the whole thing crumbled into deep water. Wind and salt, I think.”
A watery sea blowing salt on bridges? It’s too strange to even contemplate. Ahead of me awaits a bridge bound to collapse the moment I reach its middle.
Somewhere near the front of our pack, Mag rides Glory’s back. She travels near Ram, her magic at hand should we encounter other Biters intent on raiding our trade goods. Ram and Shy are the only River Walkers with horses, but we have a few carts for hauling the heavier loot—tools and cookware for the most part. Ropes over their shoulders, the last of Heaven’s men drag the carts over ancient roads, pitted and derelict with trees twisting up through their cracks.
Perhaps a hundred and twenty of Heaven’s descendants remain. Two thirds will stay with the River Walkers; all the children and pregnant women, a few men and women besides who’ve made themselves useful or developed friendships. The rest of us, a handful over thirty, will be sold or traded for horses and weapons.
The men with claims among the doves keep an eye on us. Greeb lurks on the periphery, Sloot never straying from his shadow. The big Biter doesn’t come near me, seeming content to bide his time, cautious about jeopardizing his good luck and the opportunity to put his hands on me, to fuck me. Angel and I stick to Rune like spiky burrs.
“Greeb don’t want you walking all cozy up to me,” Rune says, grinning over his shoulder at the frowning man.