CALL IT TALISMAN (IF YOU MUST)

1.

Here, the blind old man tapped this marking into my left arm and breastbone. He used his tapping stick and his sharpened irons. These are leaves and grass blades. These are sunbursts of flower petals, the flitting eyes of moth wings and cicadas. This here, the seer and her seeing stones. The glass eye with which she viewed the heavens. Above her mountain village, the stars arranged into hunter and bow, arrow aimed at mighty Lawin.

 

This is not thunder. No, only men are marked with thunder. He marked my flesh with the swirls of our village stream. Here, on my right shoulder. What I see is no stream, but a blade which women conceal beneath their skirts. Even today, we do this, though it is not proper, the elders say, for women to be marked for war.

 

It is no secret. Women did indeed fight alongside the men once. Few talk about it these days. The black-robed holy men, who carried more curses than prayer, so feared armed women, they branded us savage and sinful, they called us monsters. Women who tucked skirts between their legs, tongues of knives, hands like tilling tools, we returned home to nurse our babies after washing clean our bloodied hands.

2.

No, daughter, these are no talismans upon my flesh. The blind old man wished to give me markings in the patterns of my father’s fields, for he walked my father’s lands, from new growth’s edges to the greenest center, every sunrise in wordless prayer. Many years, he did this, never once opening his eyes. But by the time I grew old enough to marry, all his fields my father lost to the fire, and to the papers of the wealthy, not of this land but of gray cities far away from here.

 

He marked my flesh with the swirls of our village stream, though its cool, sweet water, its bubbling, no longer gives us music. It has long since been fenced and dammed, but by whom, no one who ever shows himself. Its music we have all of us forgotten. And the flowering trees that once dipped its branches into the water to drink have all withered. There is no sense in my very body carrying a reminder of all that is lost to us, for no healer of scars, and no magical markings could save any of it. This is no stream, no. It is the curve of a warrior blade.

3.

This is how my flesh was marked with the ash of burnt coconut husk and sugarcane, so that I could marry. But all the young men had neither land nor wealth, and invading armies came with bayonets. Sun worshippers, harboring no love for things of this land.

 

When my grandfather’s father was still a young man, an army of pale men came to our forest. But our men took their heads with ease. Running dogs, whimpering, they were cowards. And even the lowlanders, some marked with the talismans of their own elders, some who had grown their hair down to their waistlines, hid in our forests with rifles and the sharpest knives. They fought those pale men for many years, until those white ghosts numbered so few, they boarded their steamships and they fled.

 

But these sun worshippers, they were cruel. They used the young women as whores, slid loaded pistols between their legs, gave them sores and fevers which none of our medicines could cure. The sun worshippers also took heads, but left these to rot where they fell. No hunters were these, but mercenaries, beasts. This is why the sun wept a sky the color of black pearls. This is why he weeps still.

4.

He took me, from the river’s edge, where I washed clothes for the church man’s daughter. He took me, gripped between his fists. I feared that if I tried to escape, I would fall, pierced by the sharpest bayonet. I knew for sure I would bleed, for I had lived my entire life in my father’s house and had never before touched man. When the soldier came with his vulgar words, I leaned farther over the edge than I should have. But so venomous, his words. Upon the banks of the river for which my father was named, there, the soldier took me and took me, and the river could do nothing. I knew my brothers too could do nothing. There, he tore me in two.

 

My child, your father’s eyes. My child, one day you will curse his name.