Tiger Lily (3 page)

The children were teasing her. That, in itself, wasn’t what captured my attention; in the typical village, children are generally almost as cruel as adults. What caught my eye was her stillness. Her absolute stony composure, as if the village could have been burning and she wouldn’t have noticed or cared. She was like a dark cloud. She stood, not eight years old yet, black hair disheveled and down to her waist, arms crossed over her chest.

The taunting escalated to pushing until finally a girl, Magnolia Bud, pushed her against a vat of cool, day-old turkey broth, and all the children suddenly joined in to hoist her into the pot, then close the lid down on her. Magnolia Bud then sat on the lid while all the children whispered excitedly to each other and the girl underneath struggled and then went silent. A group of crows nearby got caught up in the excitement and squawked at the children shrilly.

Finally, hearing the commotion, a woman (Aunt Agda, I learned later) appeared, and the children ran away. Not knowing the turkey pot contained a child, she then went off to her chores.

For several moments, there was no sound. And then the lid finally moved, and Tiger Lily climbed out, gasping for breath, shaking and exhausted. She walked home quietly. Tik Tok helped her wipe the broth and strips of turkey from her face. And when Magnolia Bud was found two days later on the village path, having choked to death on a piece of turkey from that night’s soup, and with a crow sitting on her hip like an omen, the children—and indeed most of the adults—decided that she was guarded by crows.

Whether that was true or not, I couldn’t hear deep enough into her mind to know. But one afternoon, after the children had called her crow girl and run away for fear of her, I watched her slip a raven feather into her hair. After that day, she kept it in.

From then on, I was a goner. A devoted fan. I don’t know what Tiger Lily must have thought of me. I didn’t seem to be on her mind at all. She must have noticed my increasingly constant presence fluttering along behind her, or up above her, or perching on one of her tassels, but it was as if she accepted me as part of the scenery.

And I wasn’t the only one to cling to her unnoticed. There was also Pine Sap. He’d been born skinny and a bit asymmetrical. One of his hazel eyes always seemed to squint a little, making his face appear asymmetrical too. Try as he might, he couldn’t work up the bloodlust that made the other boys flourish on hunts—he was always too busy thinking things through. Somehow as children he and Tiger Lily had been shuttled together—both misfits or, as I liked to think of them, strange exotic birds, one too fierce to be hemmed in as a girl, and the other too hesitant to be respected as a boy. Since then, she had never shaken him, though she often tried to. Still, Pine Sap wasn’t the type whose ego was wounded easily. His admiration for Tiger Lily was hard and fast and stuck, and failed to waver even when she ignored him completely.

Often when I flew past the village I saw his mother, out in front of their hut calling for him, her dark bushy hair all askew, her voice hoarse from another fight with Pine Sap’s father. Pine Sap would arrive, quiet and eyes to the ground, and wait for her to pour her anger onto him. “Look at how crooked you are! You are the shape of those crooked poplars up on the cliffs!” or “How did I produce such a strange creature!” She showed her love for him by trying to shrink him in public and private. And Pine Sap listened calmly, and nodded his head from time to time to let her know she didn’t go unheard. It was almost as if he was giving her his silence, so that all of her anger had a place to go. But sometimes, he didn’t come when she called, and where was he? Following Tiger Lily through a bog, holding the spiders and reptiles she picked up and absently discarded into his mud-slippery hands, carrying her bow for her like a servant, listening to her grunt and swear over the wrongs people heaped on her. He even listened to more than her sounds, because Tiger Lily was a girl of few words. He listened with his eyes, watched facial expressions, judged body language, and therefore he read Tiger Lily better than anyone else. Perhaps he was drawn to her for this more than any other reason: Pine Sap had a knack for spotting lies from a mile away. And Tiger Lily was the only person he knew who never pretended.

I saw her from time to time as she grew. And as she grew she hunted, she ran, she perfected her aim and her abilities with a paddle. It was like she had an instinctive awareness that she had to do a little something extra to be accepted. For a long time, she took up with the boys, going with them on hunts, dominating in mud fights. Only, she did too well at everything. She was too fast; her aim was too good. Her quiet confidence gave her a reputation for being haughty, and the boys—all except for Pine Sap—didn’t like being beaten. So by her thirteenth birthday, they told her that she couldn’t join them on hunts anymore. Without a word of complaint, she started hunting alone, in the same areas, and often ran into them with a stag or a rabbit slung over her back while they stood empty-handed.

“That child will spend her life alone,” Aunt Agda was fond of saying between cluckings of her tongue, and everyone seemed to agree, except for all the suitors. They began coming from the time Tiger Lily was seven years old (as the shaman’s adopted daughter, her rank was coveted). They came from tribes near and far: the Bog Dwellers in the bogs, the Cliff Dwellers who lived in the snowy, pine-covered mountains. Her temper at those times was a spectacle to behold. She chased them all away with a hatchet, murder in her eyes. The hatchet had been a gift from Tik Tok, though he hadn’t meant it for that purpose. (Aunt Fire, one of the matrons, had even suggested her own son, Giant, as Tiger Lily’s ideal mate, but everyone had only tittered at that, because Giant was an oaf.)

Usually, though, Tiger Lily saved her inner rage for the defense of lost causes. Such as when the boys bullied Pine Sap, who always seemed too puzzled to retaliate. Or when children taunted Aunt Fire for her wrinkles, though Aunt Fire was no friend to Tiger Lily. She’d knocked two boys unconscious in a spat over Moon Eye, and people said she’d hit both of them with one blow. She even defended me once, though it may have been coincidental. Stone was trying to kill me to make a night-light for his hut. He had cornered me in a crevice of rock, and was just moving for the blow when Tiger Lily appeared out of nowhere, hatchet in hand, and petrified him into backing away. It was the first time I ever thought she might know I existed. But her mind was so dark right then, I never knew for sure. Anyway, whether she’d meant to save me didn’t matter. She was the most interesting girl I had ever seen, and I couldn’t resist staying near her to see what happened next.

A village, one as orderly as the Sky Eaters’, wants its members to fit just so. Tiger Lily didn’t, and so gossip followed her. By the time she was fifteen, the age she was the day of the shipwreck, opinions by the dozen landed in each hollow track left by her feet. I could hear the thoughts flying overhead, or when I was perched in a hay roof letting myself be groomed by crickets. It was rumored among the young people that at night she became her crow spirit, and they dared each other to leave piles of stones outside her door as a feat of bravery, fearing that they might peer through her window and see only a crow staring back at them. She would collect the stones the following morning, bewildered. Fear and, yes, even a bit of envy of her wild independence followed her side by side. But if she ever turned into a crow and flew away on night adventures, I never saw it.

Still, the longer I was around her, the more I could see the colors of her mind and the recesses of her heart. There was a beast in there. But there was also a girl who was afraid of being a beast, and who wondered if other people had beasts in their hearts too. There was strength, and there was also just the determination to look strong. She guarded herself like a secret.

But now—even having watched her for years—I could still be surprised by her. I was carrying some clover home at dusk, and just passing the council fire when there was a buzz among the villagers, and a shadowy figure appeared. It sent the well-organized group around the fire into a shudder, and a few carefully perched bowls into the fire. She’d approached so quietly they hadn’t noticed her. She was so dirty that it took a moment to recognize her.

Her arms were piled with foreign items—a telescope, a glass, and a little wooden box. She dropped the load and stared at everyone with her inscrutable eyes, her crow feather cocked at an angle.

Standing there, hair pasted to her back, covered in sweat, blood on her shoulders where a freshly killed rabbit lay, arrows pointing above her head, she was a triumphant and fearsome sight. No one could have guessed the way her heart pounded.

“I’ve saved the Englander,” she said. Everyone scattered.

T
he following dusk, the familiar music of Pine Sap’s mother berating him with words like “you’re a mistake” and “you are just like a girl” drifted through the village. The Sky Eaters tried to respect each other’s privacy, but at times like these, some curled in their toes and ground their teeth in frustration and pity. One or two even chuckled cynically and muttered that it would build Pine Sap’s character. Tiger Lily found him on the path near the dusty chicken yard, feeding the baby chicks.

He looked up at her. As she took a step forward, he stopped.

“Don’t worry, I won’t get too close,” she said. All day Tiger Lily had been watching her hands, looking for signs of aging. Sifting through her long black hair looking for grays. Everyone in the village seemed to have adopted the same notion. Walking to and from the central square, or past her on the paths, they parted way for her like she was a cold breeze, afraid of catching the aging disease now that she had been with an Englander. They whispered about Tik Tok having let her run wild for as long as he had, and how that had contributed to her betrayal. Everyone was part of the debate on how she should be punished. But so far, she had managed to ignore them all. Except Tik Tok, who wore a dark face and a darker mood as he made his visits around the village, delivering medicine, saying the necessary chants, and simply sitting to listen to those who needed an ear. It wasn’t like him to be angry, and Tiger Lily had watched him with guilt.

“I’m not worried,” Pine Sap said. Then he looked back down at the chicks. “Their mother takes such good care of them, doesn’t she?” he said, gesturing toward the mother hen, who stood proudly above her brood, picking up worms for them.

A current of compassion moved through Tiger Lily. And the momentary impulse to go terrorize Pine Sap’s mother. She wanted to tell him something encouraging, but the words wouldn’t come to her. She looked down the path thoughtfully, and was surprised to see Aunt Fire leaning on a fence and looking at her, a strange smile playing on her lips.

I had grown to dislike Aunt Fire over the years, almost as much as I disliked her oafish son, Giant. Her mind was a blur of bold colors and bright malice. And Giant’s house—the fence of which Aunt Fire was leaning on now—was one of the only ones I wouldn’t sleep in, because of the horrible noises and smells the man produced in his sleep. He would be seen sometimes sitting outside, sucking his teeth, picking out the pieces of crumbs and examining them, or eyeing the girls. He had grown into his fiftieth year before his aging had stopped. Everyone suspected his taciturn disposition of keeping him aging for so long—after all, when you were that cantankerous, it was hard for something important to happen to you. At fifty, his brother was eaten by a beast while out hunting, and that seemed to be the same time that Giant finally stopped aging for good.

The village was small, but there were big personalities that set it wobbling, and Aunt Fire and her son were two of those. They were tolerated because everyone born to the tribe was part of a family, for better or for worse. The matron’s gaze made Tiger Lily feel unsettled and hemmed in.

“Bend?” she asked Pine Sap.

“Yes.” He just started walking, and she fell in step beside him.

They walked to the river bend, stripped down, and waded in. It was their secret, because the village would have been in an uproar at a boy and girl swimming naked together, even two as much like siblings as Tiger Lily and Pine Sap. In the water, unlike on land, Pine Sap was graceful. He kept his distance from her, and she was careful not to go near him.