Rika’s baby and my puppy both grow. The baby can suckle, cry and almost lift his head. Rika carries him in a sling against her chest; he is always with her, and exhausted as she is, when she sits to feed him, her gaze is pure love.
That’s the same love that kept Chance alive in the ruins, I think – but unlike Rika, who loves her older children too, Chance’s mother ignores him when she returns with Dada.
‘But you have me now,’ I whisper into his floppy ear, and he licks my face as if he understands. Chance understands a lot. Rika’s husband has given me a leather collar and cord so that I can hold him back when the farm dogs are moving the sheep, but he already knows his name, and usually comes when I call him. He jumps to my shoulders with his front legs around my neck – a bad trick, says Dada, because he’ll be a big dog one day. I know that’s true, so I teach him the game of sitting still at my feet or waiting by Nunu. Nunu says he’s a dirty ridiculous creature, but strokes his head. His head is smooth, and soothing to stroke.
‘He’s not much use yet,’ she says, ‘but you might as well take him when you go out for the water or washing.’
I don’t need to be reminded. I don’t think anyone’s going to attack me, but with my dog by my side I don’t feel quite so alone when I see the farm girls walking in pairs.
He’s not big yet: I still let him jump to my shoulders. For a few minutes at a time, holding this squirming wriggle of joy makes me forget that everything else is wrong with the world. And on these cold winter nights, a warm puppy snuggled on my feet is better than a brazier or another fleece.
Not everyone is so lucky. The rainy season goes on, wetter, colder and longer than it has ever been. There’s no indoor toilet, and the little privy house behind the kitchen garden, which is really nothing but a shelter over a wooden bench with a hole dropping to a deep pit, is filling and stinking. The folk sheltering in the animal sheds are not allowed to use it, and have dug new pits for themselves, with no seats and not much shelter.
The fisher brings us octopus, shellfish or fish every day. If he misses one we know it’s because he had nothing to bring; Dada says that I made a good trade. But the goats’ milk has dried up and there are no new kids yet; the dried peas and lentils are nearly gone and the barley is getting low. Sometimes a rabbit or bird is caught in a trap; once a hunter brought the meat of a wild boar to trade, and the chief has twice shot a wild goat – but even a goat doesn’t go far for so many people.
And now there is sickness. It begins with shivering and a streaming nose, then a sore throat and a cough that doesn’t stop till the breath is gone and the person faints. That’s when the fever comes in: the sweats and shaking and delirium. And then death.
The first dawn that we were woken by unearthly wails, Rika herself raced to the shed to investigate, returning grave but not shaken.
‘It was our oldest woman servant,’ she said, pointing her fingers against evil. ‘She’d already lived past her time.’
There’d been so much death already, even a young mother of our clan, and two potters at the height of their powers from Nunu’s sister-in-law’s workshop. The Lady and Kora went to the animal shed with a prayer to cleanse the death spirit, but we weren’t disturbed by the keening when the old woman was buried that afternoon. Only Nunu, sweeping out the central room where we are still living, stopped to stand with her hand on her heart, her lips moving in a chant to the dead as the burial procession passed.
Farewell to life,
the sun and sky,
for our mother’s heart.
Farewell to toil,
to sea and soil,
for you will rest,
in our mother’s breast.
Your days are done
your life here gone
the mother has chosen
you for her own.
Stay with her there
and leave us here.
Nunu sang those last lines a few times, hoping that the goddess wouldn’t need another old woman for a while, but it hasn’t worked. The goddess keeps wanting more, and she doesn’t just want old ones. Before the moon is full again, she takes nearly everyone in the shed, and then she starts on the house.
She takes Kora late one morning, and before that same day’s sunset she takes the Lady.
The wise-woman beckons me. ‘It’s time to prepare them for the goddess.’
‘I haven’t finished my Learning!’ I protest.
‘You’re an almost-woman and the closest relative,’ she replies shortly. ‘The Lady’s only living daughter is still a child; she has no sister, and her other two cousins cannot get here in time.’
She doesn’t mention Mama, except to add more gently, ‘I’ll show you what to do, and her maidservant will help. This is part of life – and it won’t be as hard as looking after your mother alone in the dark, when your house fell on you.’
She is right. We do Kora first, before she stiffens, because they’d been afraid to let the Lady know that her daughter had died – though she knew, of course she knew, says the wise-woman, any mother would have known. We wash and oil her body, and I arrange her in ceremonial dress, with all her jewellery, and bind her arms and legs so that she cannot fight her fate, or flop loose on the burying board on the way to her grave. As I do it she becomes less Kora and more Gellia, the cousin I played with as a child; tears blind me as I thread her round gold hoops through the holes in her ears.
‘Sorry,’ I say, because I’ve missed and stabbed her right ear. ‘Sorry.’
But for the Lady, the fact of who she is – who she was – weighs heavier and heavier on me as we go on. Our goddess has no servant; we have no Lady and guide to our goddess.
We sit with them all the next day, keening and chanting. The room becomes crowded with women as the Swallow Clan arrive: three girls of my Learning come with their mothers, but not Pellie, whose little sister is sick, or Alia or her grandmother. Alia’s leg was broken when a wall fell on it; Rastia tells me she died three days ago, and her grandmother the next day. Alia and I were not close like Pellie and me, but she was my kin, part of my life and a Learning sister; it’s hard to believe she is gone, and that I hadn’t even known. Rastia and I weep together, and Tullie and Chella join us.
When the men arrive, I hold my breath until I see my father and Ibi, afraid that they’ve died too without my knowing. I cling to Dada the way I used to when I was a child and he was about to disappear on his ship for the long sailing season.
The burial procession starts with the dawn the following morning. The chief has said they must be buried in the proper place, no matter how difficult, and the wise-woman agrees. We must pick up the pieces of our world and show the gods that we’re worthy of life; that we treat her servants with respect.
As we start out, I can’t help thinking of the old servant woman’s death, with Nunu’s brief chant the only notice from the house. Now Nunu is the only one to stay behind, to care for Mama.
When did I stop thinking of Mama as one of us? Mama and Nunu are both staying behind. It’s just that Nunu is the only one who knows it.
The chief leads the procession, with his young daughter and his son Lius. I’ve never noticed before what a good-looking boy Lius is. Grief makes him seem older; he’s nearly as tall as his father as he takes his little sister’s hand, pulling her gently along with him. It’s too bad he’s younger than me…How can I think that now, at the funeral of his mother and sister, my aunt and cousin, the Lady and Kora?
It’s a relief when the wise-women start keening. The high ululation unlocks the horror inside me, pulsating in my ears and throat, driving out thought, driving out everything except its own pure grief: for the Lady and Kora, for all the dead, for our beautiful city and my beautiful home in it, for my Mama, who sleeps on like a grub in a cocoon while the living die around her.
My own keening mingles with the others’ till I can’t hear it alone, because we are one, from Swallow Clan to slaves – all one and all emptied, hollowed out by grief and sound. The little girl stumbles back to me, trying to wail through her tears, and I take her hand while Lius joins his father, taking his turn at banging the bronze shield gong all along the way.
The sun rises behind us as we reach the top of Crocus Mountain. The slopes brighten to green grass, white rock and red clay; the sea shimmers from dawn grey to early morning blue. Even the town, when it first comes into view, looks normal and right, as if we’re on our way home.
But it’s not normal or right, and we’re not going home. We keep on the path past the stink of the purple works, on to the bend where Triangle Plaza and the roof of our home should be clear to see.
Dada, Ibi and the chief have talked of all the work that’s been done. I’ve seen from their grey faces and sweat-stained, filthy tunics that they’ve worked as long and hard as anyone could, for the cycle of two full moons. I thought the town would be starting to look whole again – not quite perfect, but like a room that needs sweeping.
It’s still a pile of stones and brokenness. It’s worse than I remembered, much worse than I’ve imagined. I can’t pick out the Plaza, the temple, the Lady’s House or ours. It’s not home at all, and if I wasn’t already keening I’d be screaming now. It’s a relief to veer east to the cemetery before we reach the outer houses, because I don’t want to see any more of what used to be my home. The voices crescendo behind me as the other women reach the bend and see the ruins, and I’m fiercely glad to hear it. It would be beyond bearing to see and feel this misery alone.
It’s true, the wailing says, it’s true, the gong beats, this pain is true, this terror is true, we all feel it, we all see it: the gods have betrayed us and everything terrible is true.
Even the little lamb, carried over the farmer’s shoulder, starts to bleat as if it knows its fate.
But when the ritual is done, when the Lady and Kora have been laid in their graves – two more graves in the midst of so many, but a more terrible loss than a thousand of those common mounds – when their gifts of gold and bronze, honey and oil have been placed with them before the earth covers them forever, when the chief slits the lamb’s throat and the blood spurts onto the fresh dirt, feeding the great mother, the goddess of earth and death, in the hope that she will care for them and for us – I wonder how this one little lamb will be enough, when she has already taken more people than we can count.