Bloodmind (12 page)

I rose to my feet and walked once more to the window. It took a moment of effort to look out into the forest, as though Skinning Knife herself might drop from the trees like some great silent
bat. I felt myself shiver. Frey had been human. Eld was human, and so was Skinning Knife. On old Earth, my seith abilities would have seemed like magic. We were not, I told myself, dealing with
anything beyond nature, simply someone versed in a variety of techniques, and the ruthlessness or insanity required to implement them in murder. I had put Frey to his death. I would track her down
and I would serve this woman as she had served Idhunn. Before me in the moonlight, the forest seemed to glare and swim. I turned back to meet Eld’s gaze.

‘Tell me then,’ I said. ‘Where do we begin?’

The next few days were spent trying to bring in the meagre harvest before the rains came. Some of us had been farm-wives in our past lives, and knew instinctively what to
do: they had it easier than us city women, I sometimes felt, for the farm-wives were the ones who had experienced more freedom. Though they all spoke of the hardships of land-working –
something all of us knew by now – they also spoke of being left alone in the hot fields, the silences, the wind rushing through the grain, the pleasure of just
being.
I could
understand that. It was why I liked the bell tower so much: there were no voices. The goddesses were quiet. The dust made only the faintest rustling as it skittered across the floor, and the high
skirling of the efreets soon faded into the background. No one shouting, incomprehensibly or half-understood. No one making demands. The only thing that made demands on us now was the land itself;
harvests don’t wait.

Khainet came to join me in the gardens. We’d built these over a number of years, in the lee of the wall. The gardens were shady, but also got enough sun for the crops to flourish: gnarled
fruit grew there, and a variety of tough, seeded grain that we made into porridge and bread. It was monotonous, but no one much minded. When Khainet found me, I was picking the long orange fruits
we called
saq
and piling them into a basket. The sun had touched them a little too much and they were already starting to turn to mush; this evening, they would be sliced and layered in
earthenware jars, or dried on the roofs for the short winter. Beyond the bulk of the wall, the clouds were massing and the air had the metal smell of approaching thunder.

Khainet took one of the
saq
from the basket and studied it as though she had never seen it before. Perhaps she hadn’t, although they were common enough in some of the eastern
districts around Iznar.

‘If you eat that, you’ll regret it,’ I told her. ‘They’re bitter unless they’re dried first.’

She put it back in the basket. ‘Do they grow here naturally? Or did someone bring them?’

‘We found a small grove of them inside the city. We’ve been cultivating them ever since. Birds drop things sometimes and they grow. But some of the women brought seeds in their
clothing, or in scraps of food, and we’ve grown those, too.’

She nodded. ‘I wondered where the food on the table came from.’

‘It’s a struggle, all the time. I’m sure you can see why. This isn’t fertile country.’

‘How did they manage, then? The – goddesses? Did they eat air?’

I smiled. ‘We don’t know. Maybe the land was more fertile then. Maybe there was a blight, and that’s why the city is ruined and abandoned now.’

‘Where did they go, then? Why aren’t any of them here now?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘I’d like to have seen them,’ Khainet said, and I nodded as if in agreement, but privately I wondered whether it was best after all that the goddesses had gone, so that we
could make them into whatever we wanted them to be.

Khainet wanted to help and so I let her carry some of the baskets through into the dark-store, where other women would prepare the fruit later. Years ago, I’d have done the carrying
myself: I was a strong woman then, bred for it. But now the twists had come to my joints and I left the carrying to the younger women, like Khainet.

She took five baskets in, and I had to show her how to carry the first one, balancing it on her shoulder rather than hauling it along two-handed. It was clear that this kind of work didn’t
come naturally to her, and that bore out the truth of her story. It wasn’t that I distrusted her, but our memories have been so ruined, and sometimes are nothing more than a smashed puzzle.
You can get very confused as you pick through the fragments.

Khainet got the hang of the lifting, though, and I watched as she swayed down the narrow path between the bean rows, with the heavy basket cocked on her shoulder. After that first trip, when
I’d made sure that she knew what she was doing, I took my eyes off her and went back to paying attention to the fruit. It was some time after she’d taken the last basket away that I
noticed she hadn’t come back.

I called her name. No answer. I hobbled along to the store, fearing the worst, and I was right. She was crumpled on the floor, with the basket beside her: she hadn’t dropped it, but must
have fainted just as she set it down. One hand had flopped into it, as if reaching for a fruit.

I felt for her pulse. She was breathing raggedly and her colour was bad: her skin looked like white dust. I tried rousing her, then forcing a little water down her throat, but she did not
respond. I pushed a folded sack beneath her head, turned her on her side and went for help as fast as I could. By the time I reached the first row of homes – not far from the gardens, but in
the full blaze of the sun away from the wall – I was panting and the buildings were turning from dark to light and back again. I was aware of hands taking me by the arm, leading me into the
shade.

‘Hunan! What’s wrong?’

My sight was still too blurred to see her, but I recognized the voice. She’d come to us a decade ago. Her name was Tare. I tried to tell her what had happened, calmly and quietly, but I
ended up blurting it out and not making much sense, either.

‘Don’t worry,’ Tare said, and she
was
calm and quiet. ‘I’ll send someone to see to her.’

‘I have to go back. I—’

‘You stay here. Get your breath back first.’

She didn’t give me a chance to argue. A moment later, she was gone into the warren of the house and I heard her calling out to somebody. It occurred to me that I had no idea who lived
here: years back, I’d have been able to say exactly who lived with whom, even who loved whom, and I didn’t know whether it was that the colony had grown beyond my ability to remember,
or whether I was simply losing my grip. I leaned back against the rough grain of the couch and closed my eyes. I didn’t mean to sleep.

In Iznar, we were allowed out by ourselves, but only to the marketplace by the city gate. As children, we were trained how to dress over and over again by our Fathers, while our mothers stood
dumbly by. The sack-like thing we wore in the confines of the households had to be covered by another gown that we slipped over it, a wide, shapeless thing made of flounces. I don’t know who
made them, although years later one of the incoming women told me that they were issued by the Hierolath’s people. It was obvious, looking back, that they kept to a standard pattern: as
concealing as possible, with a head covering that was supposed to go over the face. Since we all looked more or less the same anyway, however, that rule was not so rigorously enforced as the actual
covering of the head: failure to do so in the street would result in a beating from one of the militias and delivery back to house confinement. I never understood why my wrist ached and burned when
I was a small child, nor the nature of the ceremony I underwent when I was delivered by my Father into House Father’s custody along with a number of jars of household fuel, an old electric
fan, and two pigs. It involved cutting the top of my wrist, then a tugging and pulling while I tried not to cry, then a bandage. Now, I think they were putting in something that held the details of
where I lived, since I did not have enough words to tell anyone that.

The market, then, was the only place where we could go on our own. House Father would issue me with a piece of paper, which I was somehow given to understand was magical: if I handed it to the
marketing manager, he would give me what I needed and I would carry it home, trotting like a dog, laden with baskets. Later, when Luck-Still-to-Come and Boy-Next-Time were older, I took them with
me and they carried things, too.

But there was one day when we went somewhere other than the market. If I’d had awareness, it would have surprised me greatly, because the household routine had barely altered from its few
patterns ever since I’d gone to House Father’s house. As it was, House Father shooed myself and the girls into our gowns and out of the door before we had time to blink, then took First
Joy by the hand and led him down the road. Meekly, we followed. We had no idea where we were going and we did not make a sound.

It was very hot. The cracked tarmac of the road surface had blistered into peeling puddles and they smelled pungent. Above us, the sky was bleached of colour by the heat. Iznar smelled and
looked as it always did: low buildings, many of them falling down and separated by wide areas of weeds, filled with the smell of vehicle fumes, cooking oil, dust . . . And there were many more people
than was usual even for market day: men and women, the women all gowned, just like ourselves. There was an odd feeling in the air – something tense and excited. I did not understand it, of
course, but it affected me, making my skin itch beneath the flounces of the gown.

We trudged on through the afternoon heat, past the road that led to the marketplace. The girls tugged at my hand, expecting to take that road, but House Father, with First Joy close at his
heels, was marching past. Mute and puzzled, we followed the men.

There was another gate. It was much bigger than the gate near the market, high and arched, topped with a dome made of a pale green stone. I thought it was beautiful. I couldn’t stop
staring at it, to such an extent that when House Father turned and saw me, he gave an impatient curse and struck the side of my head. It was a light blow, for which I was grateful, but I did not
want another one and so I scurried on.

In the centre of the square that lay before the great gate was a strange thing: a tall turret, with a chain hanging from it. Crowds milled before it, not just men and their womenfolk, but
traders selling food and baskets of things that, later, I understood to be religious symbols. House Father bought a basket of cracked corn for himself and First Joy. There was nothing for us, and I
could see that Boy-Next-Time, who was greedy, wanted some, so I slapped her before she could howl. House Father would have hit her harder and I did not want that.

All of a sudden, however, the crowd fell silent. Everyone turned to the thing at the centre of the square as if they knew what was about to happen. We did not. We just stared. Beneath the green
dome, the gates began to creak open: an awful sound of metal on metal. It reminded me of the forge down the road, which scared me – the showers of sparks, the terrible clanking and hissing
noises – so that I always crossed over the road on market day and did not have to walk past it. I clasped my daughters’ hands more tightly and took a step back.

They were the Hierolath’s militia. They were bringing a woman through the gate, dragging her as if she was asleep. Now, I realize she had been stunned. A man stepped up to the base of the
turret and started saying something in a loud voice, which naturally I did not understand. Every so often there would be cries and shouts from the men in the crowd. I stole a look at House Father
and he was staring raptly at the man on the stage, his mouth slightly agape.

The militiamen hauled the woman like a sack of roots up to the stage. She was starting to wake up now. She looked wildly around her and she did not have control of her mouth: she was dribbling,
saliva pouring in skeins down her chin. The ranting man on the stage grabbed the end of the chain and it came rattling down to hit the stone flags of the square with a crash. The woman flinched
when she heard it and so did I. Very quickly, the militiamen attached the end of the chain to a ring round the woman’s ankle. The man on the stage touched something set into the turret that I
could not see – a winch, perhaps. The chain again rattled up, taking the woman with it. She was screaming. I looked up and saw her outlined against the burn of the sky, jerking and twisting
from the chain that held her leg. A white bird fluttered up from somewhere and flew around her head, close enough that its wings brushed her twitching head. It made me hot and sick to look at the
bird, though I did not know why. When they saw it, many of the men cried out as if they, too, were afraid.

More words from the man on the stage. Boy-Next-Time, Luck-Still-to-Come and I all stared in anticipation. The chain was released. The bird disappeared. The woman crashed to the floor and her
head struck the flagstones. It burst like a melon dropped out of a window. Blood and something grey, like sponge, spilled out across the flagstones. The weight of the chain fell across her unmoving
body.

The men all gave a great sigh, as if they spoke with a single voice. The women were silent. After that, we went home, but I looked back just as we were about to leave the square and saw that a
swarm of hornets had settled on the body of the woman and were busy stripping it down to bone. The militiamen were going back through the gate, and I could not see the man who had been on the stage
at all. No one was paying any attention to what was happening to the woman’s body.

I dreamed about it that night, and for many nights to come. I still dream about it, and on the day when Khainet fainted, it came back with such force that I felt as though I’d lived
through it all over again.

I woke to the stuffy heat of Tare’s house, with the shadows falling long across the floor. Nothing stirred. I got to my feet. The heat sickness had faded and I felt clear-headed and light,
too much so, as though I’d been detached from my body and was floating. It felt so strange that I almost nipped my arm with my nails, to make sure that I wasn’t still dreaming.