Sister Emily's Lightship (6 page)

Who but a Jew, after all, was little and dark—never mind that half of the population both in front of and behind the walls were tall and blonde thanks to the Vikings who had settled their trade center in Kiev generations before. Who but a Jew had an unpronounceable name—never mind that the local goyish names did not have a sufficiency of vowels. Who but a Jew would steal a Christian child, slitting its throat and using the innocent blood in the making of matzoh—never mind that it was the Jews, not the gentiles, who had been on the blade end of the killing knife all along.

Besides, it had been years since the last pogrom. Blood calls for blood, even if it is just a story. Leon went to his friends, elaborating on Tana's tale.

What happened next was simple. Just as the
shammes
was going around the ghetto, rapping with his special hammer on the shutters of the houses and calling out “Arise, Jews, and serve the Lord! Arise and recite the psalms!” the local bullyboys were massing outside the ghetto walls.

In house after house, Jewish men rose and donned their
tefillin
and began their prayers; the women lit the fires in the stoves.

Then the wife of Gdalye the butcher—his new wife—went out to pull water from the well and saw the angry men outside the gate. She raised the alarm, but by then it was too late. As they hammered down the gate, the cries went from the streets to Heaven, but if the Lord G-d was home and listening, there was no sign of it.

The rabble broke through the gates and roamed freely along the streets. They pulled Jews out of their houses and measured them against a piece of lumber with a blood red line drawn halfway up. Any man found below the line was beaten, no matter his age. And all the while the rabble chanted “Little black imp!” and “Stealer of children!”

By morning's end the count was this: two concussions, three broken arms, many bruises and blackened eyes, a dislocated jaw, the butcher's and baker's shops set afire, and one woman raped. She was an old woman. The only one they could find. By pogrom standards it was minor stuff and the Jews of Ykaterin-islav were relieved. They knew, even if the
goyim
did not, that this sort of thing is easier done in the disguise of night.

One man only was missing—Shmuel Zvi Bar Michael, the moneylender. He was the shortest and the ugliest and the blackest little man the crowd of sinners could find.

Of course the rest of the Jews were too busy to look for him. The men were trying to save what they could of Gdalye the butcher's shop and Avreml the baker's house. The women were too busy binding up the heads of Reb Jakob and his son Lev, and the arms of the three men, one a ten-year-old boy, and the jaw of Moyshe the cobbler, and tending to the old woman. Besides Shana had been too guilt-ridden to press them into the search.

It was not until the next day that she found his body—or the half of it that remained—in the soldiers' trenches.

At the funeral she tore her face with her fingernails and wept until her eyes were permanently reddened. Her hair turned white during the week she sat
shiva.
And it was thus that Granny Rumple was born of sorrow, shame, and guilt. At least that was my great-grandmother's story. And while details in the middle of the tale had a tendency to change with each telling, the ending was always tragic.

But the story, you say, is too familiar for belief?
Belief!
Is it less difficult to believe that a man distributed food to thousands using only a few loaves and fishes? Is it less difficult to believe the Red Sea opened in the middle to let a tribe of wandering desert dwellers through? Is it less difficult to believe that Elvis is alive and well and shopping at Safeway?

Look at the story you know. Who is the moral center of it? Is it the miller who lies and his daughter who is complicitous in the lie? Is it the king who wants her for commercial purposes only? Or is it the dark, ugly little man with the unpronounceable name who promises to change flax into gold—and does exactly what he promises?

Stories are told one way, history another. But for the Jews—despite their long association with the Lord G-d—the endings have always been the same.

Then Great Alta reached into the crevice of night and pulled up two light sisters with her left hand. She reached in again and pulled up two dark sisters with her right. The one pair, light and dark, she set facing one another, belly to belly and breast to breast. The other pair she set back against back so that their hairs intertwined but they knew one another not.

“Ye are all my daughters,” quoth Great Alta, “whether you look toward or away, whether you look far or near. You will not lose any love wherever your gaze should fall.”

She touched their eyes with her right forefinger, their mouths with her left forefinger, and their hearts with her open palm, and thus were they made fully awake.

As told by Mother Anda, great-great-grandaughter of Magna, last of the Sisters Arundale:

Once there was a garden in which our mothers and fathers lived. It was a comfortable place where fruit grew without cultivation and water ran over twenty-one stones to become pure.

But one of the fathers turned to his companions and said, “I want to see the world outside the garden. Who would go with me?”

Some of the fathers said yes. Some of the mothers, too.

But there were two mothers who did not go. “We are happy here,” they said. “Where the sun shines on us and the wind cools us and the fruit grows without cultivation.” And so they stayed in the garden and raised their children.

Only once in a lifetime, some of the children followed the others into the outside world we call the Dales.

Selna had never wanted a child to care for. Not a baby sister nor a little cousin. And so she had paid little heed to the Hame's infirmarer during lessons about how children were got and how they were not. Of course she paid as little attention to the kitchener's explanations about food. All Selna had ever wanted, even before she had to choose in the great ceremony before Mother, was to be in the woods with Marda.

Her voice had never wavered when she and her seven-year sisters had been asked “Do you, my children, choose your own way?” Marda's voice had been quiet, and Zenna's quieter still. Lolla and Senja had replied in their high, light way. But Selna's answer came strong and pure.

And when she had marched up the stairs to touch the Book of Light, her knees had not wobbled. Not even when the priestess's sour breath had touched her. Not even then.

“I am a child of seven springs,” she had said. “I choose and I am chosen. The path I choose is a warrior. A huntress. A keeper of the wood.”

No one, especially not Mother Alta, had been surprised.

But now things were different, had been different for months. And Selna could not exactly say what was wrong, only that things were different. And Marda was gone. Marda, her best friend, who had trained all those years with her and who was her companion and blood sister—the last sworn with knives at the wrist where the blood makes a blue branching beneath the fragile shield of skin, a poultice of aloe leaves applied afterward. Marda had gone missioning.

Selna's mother had found her sobbing in the night. “She will return,” her mother reminded her, kneeling by the bed. “A mission year is but one world's turning.”

“Or she will not,” Selna had said, too miserable to hide her tears as a warrior should. “Some stay at their mission Hame. Or go to another.”

Her mother nodded. “Or she will not. After her mission year in her new Hame, she may have other, newer dreams. But her decision will be between Marda and her dark sister. It is not between Marda and you.”

“But…” The cry was out before Selna could stop it.

“But what?”

Selna's traitor mouth would not contain the words. “But
I
was her sister. Her blood sister. There was no one closer.”

Her mother's dark sister kneeling at the bedside chuckled. “Soon you will understand, child.”

“I will never understand. Never. I will be a solitary. I will call no one to take Marda's place.”

Selna's mother stood and her dark sister with her. “Come,” the dark sister said. “She will know soon enough.”

Selna looked up from her pillow.
“The heart is not a knee that can bend,”
she said. “Or did you not tell me that often enough?” Then deliberately she reached over and snuffed out the candle by her bed.

Her mother's footsteps were the only ones to go out of the room. Her mother's dark sister, without a candle's flame to guide her, was no longer there.

Zenna called her own dark sister the next moon. Lolla and Senja, twins in everything, called theirs together.

“It is a wonder they did not call up just one,” their mother said. But she said it laughing.

Everyone joined in the laugher but Selna. Selna laughed very little these days. No—Selna did not laugh at all. She left the table where the conversation continued and went out into the courtyard of the Hame. She got her throwing knife from the cupboard and fitted it into her belt, then took down her bow from its slot against the wall. The quiver she filled with seven arrows and slung over her shoulder. Then she went out the gate.

She ran down the path easily, her mocs making little sound against the pebbles. She used wolf breath to give her the ability to run many miles. It was not that far till she would reach the woods. As she ran, she thought about how she and Marda had raced almost every day along this same path, the one keeping breath with the other. How they ran left foot with left, right foot with right. How they matched in everything—the color of their hair the same wheat gold, their eyes both the slate blue of the rocks by the little river. Only she was tall and Marda was a hand's breadth shorter.

“I love you, Marda,” she had said the day they had opened their wrists and sealed their lives together.

“I love you, Selna,” Marda had answered, as she smoothed the aloe onto the leaf and bound it with the vine.

They had been children of nine summers then. Now they were fourteen.

“I still love you, Marda,” Selna said. But she said it to the white tree standing sentinel at the woods's first path. She said it to the three tall rocks that they had played on so often as children. And she said it to the river that rippled by uncaring.
Twenty-one stones,
the saying went,
and water is pure.

The women of the mountain warrior clans lived in walled villages called Hames. As far as we can tell, there were five main buildings in each Hame: the central house, in which were the sleeping and eating and cooking quarters, was the largest building. It opened onto a great courtyard where the training of warriors took place. What animals they kept—goats, fowl, possibly cows—were in one small barn. A second, even smaller barn housed the stores, part of which were kept down in a cellar, where stoneware bottles were put by with fermented drinks—berry wines and even, in a few of the Hames, a kind of ginger beer. A small round building housed a bathing pool heated by a series of pipes to a central wood heater. There were two smaller, shallower pools. From the Lowentrout essay “The Dig Arundale: Pooling Resources,”
Nature and History,
Vol. 57, comes the interesting theory that one of the small pools was for the children while the other, with a separate series of exit pipes, was for women during their menses. The other building, some scholars feel, was a training center or school. Others hypothesized that this fifth building was a place of worship.

Selna found the deer tracks by the river's edge. They were incautious tracks, scumbled tracks, for the deer was still young and looking for any kind of footing. In the imprint of one was the imposition of a large cat's track.

“Ho, my beauty,” Selna said. Whether she meant the deer or the cat was not clear.

Both deer and cat had crossed the river at the shallow turning. Selna followed them carefully, the bow already strung. She knew she might be too late. The deer might have made a dash for safety and the cat, in its frustration, got its fill of rabbit or mice. Or the cat might even now be feasting on raw venison. Or tracking behind Selna…but she did not believe the last. The cat's prints showed it clearly and steadily behind the deer.

She went back and forth across the river three times after those tracks and, at last, lost them both when night closed in. She was neither angry nor frustrated; only suddenly Marda's treason gnawed anew. Once Selna had nothing left to do but make a hide in a tree for sleeping, her unhappiness came over her again, wave after wave of it, like a river in flood.

Sleep would not come. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw Marda leaving.

“We will think of you,” Marda had said, kissing her on both cheeks.
We.
Once, Selna knew, that would have meant Marda and Selna. Now it meant Marda and her dark sister, that black-haired, black-eyed echo, that moon child.

“I hate her!” Selna said aloud.