It’s like the procession of the spring festival, when the whole town carries their house goddess up to the shrine on Crocus Mountain so she can feed on the sacrifices and bring fruitfulness to the home. Except instead of goddesses carved from wood or stone, we’re carrying real people of bleeding flesh and broken bone. And no one is singing.
Mama is one of the lucky ones carried on an upside-down bed, Ibi and Dada taking the front legs, two sailors taking the back. Every little while they stop and change places so the other arm takes the weight; where the path is level they lift the bed to their shoulders.
Nunu and I are carrying baskets of food: dried figs and dried fish, small flasks of honey, wine and oil. I wish I knew how to carry one on my head like a peasant. Nunu must have learned when she was young but she’s too stooped now – it would topple off in front of her. The bigger baskets are strapped to our backs and we each carry another; like the men, we change arms, carry them hugged to our chests, lift them to our shoulders – anything to change the strain and lessen the pain.
In some streets all the houses are damaged; sometimes one house in the middle is standing up bravely in the midst of chaos, but Dada and the chief say we can’t stop yet. The earthmother is still shaking. One tremor is strong enough to throw Nunu to the ground; I cling to the nearest wall and Dada shouts at me to move away. But houses are safe; houses are shelter – it’s hard to remember that suddenly they can kill us!
A girl behind me drops her basket; a jug of wine breaks, dripping red over her feet, and she starts to cry.
Ibi snarls at her. Ibi’s home has been destroyed; his wife and baby escaped with the rest of her family but he doesn’t know where they are. Anger hovers over him like a cloud.
We walk on. I’m lucky – I found Mama’s sandals in the vestibule under the big beam when the men cleared it to open the door. My feet were already so cut and grazed from the broken pottery on the floor that I couldn’t have walked this far without them. And we’re barely out of town yet, coming up the hill that shelters the purple cove.
The stink washes up to us. How can so much be lost and this stink remain? From the top of the hill it looks as if the buildings there aren’t even damaged.
The goddess must love her sacred purple above all else, to protect its workers like this!
But even if the choice were mine, I’d never be tempted to take refuge in that stink.
It starts to drizzle. Some families stop, arranging pots and baskets around them and huddling under capes and fleeces. We trudge on: shivering, cold and sore – and I know that Mama, still and pale on her stretcher bed, will die out here in the cold rain.
Doesn’t Dada realise? I hurry to catch up with him. ‘How far are we going? Mama…’
‘Your mama needs more than a shelter of fleeces,’ he replies. ‘We’re heading for the farms on the other side of Crocus Mountain; goddess willing, there’ll still be houses standing to take in Swallow Clan. The chief and the Lady are ahead of us with their household.’
‘Fish,’ says Mama suddenly, her tongue poking out to lap at the raindrops.
Dada turns in shock, stumbling and nearly dropping his leg of the stretcher bed.
‘Mama! You’re awake!’
She blows a bubble and is quiet again.
‘We’ll catch you a fish,’ Dada promises.
Mama doesn’t stir.
‘She probably thinks she’s a fish,’ Ibi mutters. ‘Swimming in the rain.’
Dada glares at him. ‘Nunu will cook it for you just the way you like,’ he says.
It sounds like her song. Maybe that’s what Mama wants! I sing it to her, the way she used to sing it to me when I was little.
oh my love, oh my lovely,
if I catch you a fish
will you love me too?
If I cook you a fish,
oh my love, oh my lovely,
if I cook you a fish
will you love me too?
Ibi joins in for the last two lines, but Mama doesn’t stir again.
Another tremor; more people calling out to their families to stop, they’re not going inside a building anywhere. Better to take their chances with falling raindrops than falling bricks. Only our kitchen maid Tiny, still carrying the ewer of ale she’d been holding when Mama shouted to get out of the house, hurries up to us. ‘People said you were up ahead,’ she gasps, breathless. ‘I’ve been trying…’ She sees Mama, and can’t say more.
But as the procession clears, I see another household is still behind us.
‘Pellie!’
We rush to each other, dropping our baskets, hugging and crying, words tumbling out with our tears.
‘Your house!’
‘Your mama!’
‘I thought she would die.’
‘I was so afraid!’
Her mother and my father call; we pick up our baskets and walk on, bumping sides in our closeness. Our stories become truer, more real, as we tell each other. When the front of Pellie’s house collapsed, they were able to get down the servants’ stairs at the back. No one was injured.
‘I thought your house didn’t look so bad,’ she says guiltily, as if she could have changed things if she’d known the truth. ‘I didn’t know you were trapped in there.’
‘It was so dark, Pellie – I thought I’d never see light again!’
She kisses my cheek. ‘We camped in a goatfield last night – there were lots of families there, and no one had seen you. I thought…’
We’re both crying and shivering; we’re filthy, bruised and grazed, and more frightened than we’ve ever been in our lives. But we’re alive, and together.
‘Pellie!’ her mother calls. ‘I need you to carry the baby for a while.’
I’m turning with her when Nunu stumbles. She’s not going to be able to walk much farther if I don’t help her. So now Pellie is acting as a nursemaid, and I’m supporting mine.
But these few minutes of walking with my friend have let in some hope. I could almost pretend this is a normal day, part of a test for our Learning.
It’s nearly dark. The slope down the other side of Crocus Mountain is gentle but the path is muddy; Tiny is carrying my basket, but Nunu is still carrying hers and leaning on me so heavily that I might as well be carrying her. Pellie’s family stopped to camp when the sun set. Our family is alone.
Suddenly there are lights moving through the darkness: torches coming towards us. Dada shouts, and now the men beneath the torches are close enough to see. They stop before us, saluting with their free hands and panting.
‘Captain!’ says the first. ‘The chief sent us back for you.’
There are four of them. They take the legs of my mother’s bed, as gently and reverently as if she were the Lady herself, and Dada’s sailors take the baskets from Nunu and me. Nunu links her arms through Ibi’s and mine, and we drag her the rest of the way. Only Dada walks free, yet he moves as if his burden is heavier than anyone’s.
Not far ahead, firelight glows softly through windows – though the closer we get the more tired I am, the more I’m sure I can never walk that far, and the more I long for that warmth. I didn’t know it was possible to be this tired.
Dada, who’s been walking beside the stretcher bed, turns back as if he hears my thoughts. He takes Nunu’s arm from me, and puts his other around my shoulders. For a few moments, as we reach the farmhouse and the door swinging open to welcome us, I’m very glad to be a cared-for child again.
The chief, the Lady and their family are already there, with another uncle of our clan, a wise-woman and her tall young apprentice, and four children sleeping on fleeces like puppies in front of the fire. It’s not a small house, but already crowded.
However, the farmers welcome us, shy and proud to have so many great visitors in their home. They felt the earthmother’s shaking, the husband says, but the greatest damage was an urn of goat’s milk that rolled off the table and shattered. ‘But there’ll be milk again tomorrow,’ he says, as if that’s what matters.
The wife approaches Mama on her stretcher, starting to welcome her, as if my mother is lying down for no reason other than weariness. At the sight of her face the woman gasps and makes the sign against evil.
Nunu looks as if she’s going to slap her – it’s probably lucky that her old legs give way at that moment and she slides down against the wall.
‘Leave the lady to us!’ the wise-woman says sharply, instructing the men to carry Mama nearer the fire. ‘We need dry coverings – for the others too, they’re all soaked to the bone.’
The farmer woman scurries upstairs and returns laden with fleeces and skins clutched against the baby swell of her tunic. The wise-woman rolls the sleeping children out of the way. Together with her apprentice, me and Nunu – because Nunu struggles to her feet when she sees someone else preparing to care for Mama – the wise-woman slides my mother off the bed onto dry fleeces. The bed is flipped right way up, another soft fleece laid on the hide, and we lift Mama back onto it. The wise-woman sits by her, crooning softly as she moves her hands gently over Mama’s face, head and body, never quite touching, pausing at times and frowning as if she is feeling an invisible barrier.
‘Come,’ the apprentice tells me, untying the shoulder tie on my tunic. ‘We need to get you dry. You too, Old One.’
‘Turn around!’ Nunu snaps at the men, and I realise we’re going to change here, in this open room, without screens or walls; secreted by nothing but trust.
‘You heard her,’ says Dada in his captain’s voice.
Trust might be enough.
But the farmer woman stares in shock as I step out of my tunic, and then my shift, to stand naked in front of the fire.
‘Did you think that the Swallow Clan grow differently from you under their skirts?’ Nunu hisses at her, as the tall girl rubs me dry, clucking at cuts and bruises I haven’t noticed till now.
The woman flushes, and hands me a rough woollen tunic to pull on. It’s warm and heavy, falling nearly to my ankles, but I am still shivering. The apprentice drapes another fleece around me like a cloak, and turns to Nunu.
‘You’re injured,’ she says gently, because my old nurse, now that someone else is caring for Mama and me, has collapsed to the floor again. Her ankle is streaked with dried blood and swollen as fat as her thigh.
‘It’s nothing!’ Nunu snaps.
The older wise-woman, without even turning from her work of gently oiling Mama’s wounds, says, ‘You’re no good to your lady dead. Warm yourself and heal so you can help her.’
Meekly and shakily, Nunu strips. Her thigh is gashed from hip to knee, still oozing blood. People say servants don’t feel pain the same way we do – but how did she walk so far like that?
The farmer woman, however, rallies at the sight of the wound: Nunu’s tongue is sharp, but the rest of her is weak. And she looks so old, so wizened: her skinny legs with the sparse grey triangle of hair between them, the empty pockets of her breasts, and most of all, the way her face has turned the colour of cold ash – this is not a woman to fear. This is another wounded creature.
She brings the wise-woman honey to seal the wound, a strip torn from an old skirt for a bandage, and a cloak to cover Nunu until her own clothes dry.
There are no more dry clothes left in this house! And the woman has spread ours to dry when any fool can see they need washing, stiff as they are with dirt and blood. And all our fine things – my father’s dress cloak and tunic, my fine woven bed linens, my mother’s ceremonial flounced skirt – are buried under what’s left of our home. Praise the goddess I found my skirt – and now I’m glad our host set it to dry by the fire, because I’d wash it myself before I let it to go out of my sight with an unknown washing girl.
The men come in to the fire now, to strip, dry and wrap themselves in the farmer husband’s clean loincloths. My father, staring down at my mother, is suddenly the same ashen colour as Nunu.
‘She needs rest,’ says the wise-woman.
‘Will she wake?’
The wise-woman makes the sign of prayer. ‘If the gods wish it.’
The room is crowded. The Lady is in the bedchamber upstairs; Kora is with her, her children and her maid; her husband the chief will perhaps sleep in the chamber too, but I suddenly realise that the rest of us will have to stay down here, in this one hall. All together.
The goddess quivers again, rattling pots, rolling the floor under our feet.
My heart pounds; I sway and nearly fall – the ceiling is falling on me!
It’s as real as if it’s happening; I can hear it, see it, feel it in my bones…but the tremor stops, and the house is unharmed.
Keep Mama safe, Great Mother, and I won’t complain about sleeping like a servant!