Chance’s howling fades behind me; I hope Nunu’s still holding tight to his collar, almost as much as I wish I had him by my side. I stumble as the first light begins to glint through the grey, and tears leak from my eyes. Or maybe it’s just the eye-watering stench, worse with every step. I sing the dawn as I walk, even though I don’t want the sun to rise, don’t want to get where I’m going.
The purple works are further away than I thought, and bigger. There are shelters for slaves, houses for dyers and well-built warehouses, far enough from the shore that they weren’t damaged in the flood. Or maybe the giant wave didn’t enter this sheltered cove inside the wider harbour – whatever the reason, this place survived better than anywhere else I’ve seen since that terrible night. Now it’s busy as a harbour on a sailing day. Dripping naked divers carry baskets up from the sea, squatting slaves in loincloths hammer shells with rocks, tripod cauldrons hiss over fires, clouds of stinging wasps and buzzing flies hover over pots of purple slime, overseers shout and people cry and curse at hammered fingers or stung noses.
‘The palace has sent me to work here.’
A small, pig-nosed man at the entrance studies me as if he can’t understand my words.
I try to look calm and confident. Try not to flap my hands at the flies, and most of all, try not to choke. Like the morning of the saffron picking – trying to sing the great mother’s praises and ignore her burping.
It’s the only thing that is like that morning. This smell is worse than the earthmother’s belch; it’s more disgusting than anything from this world should be. It fills the air like smoke, smothers like ash, attacks like an animal, burrowing into my skin. I will never be clean again.
‘I’ve been sent to work here,’ I repeat, more slowly and loudly in case he’s deaf. Being deaf would be a blessing, with the overwhelming din. Though not being able to smell would be better. ‘I can weave,’ I add hopefully.
Pignose laughs. ‘You think weavers work out here? If the palace wanted you to weave, you’d be in town. That’s where the wool gets spun and woven – they don’t send the fabric out till it’s ready to be dyed.’
‘I’ll do other work,’ I say, ignoring the panicked voice in my head: What other work?
‘Maybe you’ve apprenticed as a dyer?’ He sneers, because of course he knows I haven’t. ‘It’s slaves as work here. So if you’ve run away from a mistress in town, go back and face your beating – there’s nothing fit for you here.’
‘I have no mistress,’ I say, my face glowing like a liar’s though I’m telling the truth. ‘My home is gone, and my people, except for my mama and grandmother.’ I suppose Nunu’s a slave, but grandmother actually seems truer now as well as safer. ‘My mama is like a child since the earth shook; I must care for all of them. That’s why I went to the labour captain yesterday. He assigned me here and put us down for rations for the three of us, for my work.’
Pignose’s face twists as if he’s adding something up, and settles into smugness as he decides. ‘Palace don’t want you, nor town nor fishers. You’re not used to working and you’ve got no skills – you’re not worth one slave’s rations, let alone three. But if that’s what the palace says, I’ll find work for you, with shelter and rations for the others.’
Shelter in the slave quarters! Mama cried at the thought of the homeless camp, but this would kill her.
‘We don’t need shelter.’
‘Don’t think the folks at camp will let you back in when you’re working here!’
‘We’ll stay where we are.’ There’s no reason to tell him we’re not at the camp. I don’t want him to know any more about me than he has to.
He shrugs. ‘All the same to me where you sleep. But if you’re not here for headcount every sunrise, all three of you will be thrown out to starve.’
‘I’ll be here.’
‘I’ll be here!’ he mimics, in a squeaky voice that sounds nothing like me.
Am I supposed to laugh? Salute? I do nothing.
‘You start with them, off to the hills to get bait for the traps.’ He points to two small boys and a girl, none of them more than seven summers old.
I can surely manage anything they can.
‘Remember: the rottener the better, that’s what the beasties like. You fill these baskets or there’ll be no rations – but even folk as used to be priests must know how to follow the vultures.’
He stares to see how I react; he wants to humiliate me as much as he can. He wants to tell me I’m a slave.
I’m not! I’m not a slave, because I can leave. There’s nothing forcing me to come back tomorrow.
Except starvation.
But I’m still me, Leira! I’m not a slave and I never will be!
I pick up the filthy baskets and follow the naked children into the hills. Out of sight of Pignose and the works, I untie my beautiful flounced skirt, fold and hide it under a rock. A rock by the root of the only olive tree on this hill, where I can see the sea to the north and the town to the south… I paint it into my mind, to make sure I can find it again tonight.
Without my skirt to cover it, the loose sides of my nightshift flap in the breeze. It’s already well shredded from catching on thorns and prickles all the way across the mountains – a few more rips and there’ll be nothing left from the waist down.
I tuck the back between my knees, knotting it with the front into loose pants. I’m covered from neck to thighs, in a place where no one else is wearing more than a loincloth – but even out of sight of anyone except these three naked children, I feel bare and ridiculous. And humiliated. Completely, absolutely, overwhelmingly humiliated.
The children watch me warily.
‘My skirt,’ I tell them. ‘Nobody touch.’
They look so frightened I relent. ‘What are you called?’
Their thin little faces fill with terror and confusion.
How can they not know their own names?
‘I’m Leira,’ I say, which seems to confuse them even more. I don’t try again. If they don’t know about names I’m guessing they don’t know what a skirt is. I’ll just hope it’ll be safe till tonight. Why did I wear it? Why was I so stupid to think I’d be allowed to weave if I looked decent?
We trudge on, heading east into the sun until the purple stink fades enough that we can breathe. Maybe this isn’t a bad job after all.
Suddenly the taller boy, whose right foot twists in at a funny angle, grunts and points. Vultures are circling, flapping down to something on the ground. The children are almost running towards it. Running towards a vulture! Are they crazy?
‘Stop!’ I shout. Pignose said follow the vultures – not fight with them!
I’ve never been so close to one. Their heads are white but their bodies glow red in the dim sun, as if their chests are smeared with blood. Stories tell of them snatching babies from parents to feed to their own young, and I wonder if it’s only babies – their black wings spread wider than Dada’s arms.
But the children don’t care that they’re barely as tall as the birds. They pick up branches and whirl them over their heads, racing shrieking towards whatever is lying on the ground. The birds flap away, one of them carrying a long bloody bone.
Whatever it used to be – a goat or an ibex, I hope – has been dead for longer than I can guess. Up close, it stinks nearly as disgusting as the purple works. The children dash in to cram lumps of putrid flesh into their baskets. Turning, they stare and wait for me to do the same.
That’s what we’re here for: collect rotten meat to bait the traps. Just do it.
I’m not touching it.
I find a rock to scrape it up with, lean over the remains – and vomit.
The children laugh so hard I’m surprised they don’t throw up too.
Now the smell of my own vomit is added to the stench of rot. The sight of it makes me gag, but I try again, poking flesh onto my rock with a stick. The children think this is even funnier than vomiting onto it, but eventually I manage to fill my baskets – without ever touching the rottenness or being sick again.
The baskets are heavy; we walk back slowly, the smell growing again as we draw closer. I was wrong about the dead smell in the hills being as bad as this. Nothing stinks like this. I start towards the gates but the children shake their heads violently, grunting in fear.
Fear is what it means to be a slave. I don’t know what the punishment would be for walking into the works, like I thought I was supposed to, instead of following the children down to the beach. I don’t have to know – I’ve already caught their fear.
Out in the deeper waters of the cove, divers jump off small fishers’ boats. Just when I’m sure they must have drowned, they burst up again, clinging to the side with one hand and passing the end of a rope to the fisher on board. The diver catches his breath as the fisher hauls, shoves the dripping basket-trap onto the boat, and dives again.
Sometimes the trap slips off the boat and sinks like a stone – a real stone, not a floating bone of a dead island – trailing its rope behind it. One young fisher boy catches the rope when that happens and is pulled overboard with it. The older men know to wait for the diver to bring it up again, though one overbalances as he helps haul the trap on board, and the little boat flips upside-down, throwing out its cargo of full traps as well as the men. Two other divers swim over to help; the boat is shoved right way up, and the fisher scrambles back on board, splashing water out with his hands. The divers disappear into the sea to find the ropes and start hauling the traps up again.
As the boats return to shore, the divers haul their traps onto the beach and start sorting the contents. Eels and a few small fish are kept aside to be cooked and eaten, and finally the murex shellfish – the reason for all this activity as well as the stink – are thrown into baskets to be taken up to the works where they can be turned into precious purple dye. I expect them to be purple, but their heavy whorled shells are mud coloured, and the meat inside is the brown of most shell creatures.
A piercing scream. A diver clearing a trap is writhing on the shore.
‘Scorpion fish!’ The shout is echoed around the beach as the other divers race to him.
I point my fingers against evil. I remember Dada in the sea god’s beautiful shrine room, talking to Mama when they didn’t know I was listening, still a child too young to know that grown-ups could cry. ‘These evil fish look like stones,’ he’d said. ‘One of my young sailors stepped on one when he jumped off the ship to haul her in. The pain was fast but the death was slow, and such agony he begged me to kill him. To my shame, I couldn’t.’
Mama murmured something I couldn’t hear, but Dada was louder.
‘I swore to the gods that if it happened again, I’d have the courage and face their consequences.’
The divers are keening as if the bitten man is already dead, but one bends over him, ear to lips and they all pause to listen. One by one, they touch his forehead and then their own hearts, and the keening changes to a hymn I’ve never heard.
God of the cove, father of the deep,
guardian of creatures
who swim and crawl
giving their lives
to bring life and death,
we praise your bounty
and offer one of our own,
freed now from slave life.
God of the cove, take him,
free him from pain.
God of the cove, keep him,
in your home in the deep.
God of the cove, spare us
that we can worship you more.
The bitten diver’s arm is red and swollen to the shoulder; his screams crescendo and subside. Still singing, four men lift his writhing body gently onto a boat and push it out to sea. Two climb on with him, one to hold him steady and the other to paddle. The other divers and fishers – everyone on the beach except the three children and me, and the pig-nosed overseer striding down from the works – take their boats and paddle out in a procession behind them.
Like a funeral procession – except he’s not dead.
We can still hear the singing when they reach the rougher water where the cove meets the wider harbour. The men’s forms are blurred as they slide the diver into the sea, but his thrashing and struggles are clear. They sing as they return too, but not so loudly. Most are weeping.
‘What are you waiting for?’ snaps Pignose.
Face of a pig, soul of a vulture.
The sun is past its peak as we hand over our baskets; the divers drop stinking bits of rotten ibex into the empty traps, and head back out on their little boats to lay the traps again. We pick up their baskets of fresh murex, carry them up to the works and dump them into big pots with a pitcher of sea water.
A gong sounds.
‘Food!’ says the little girl.
It’s the only clear word I’ve heard any of the children say.
The food is a sort of fish and sea-greens stew of every edible thing caught in the traps, and the remains of the big murex when their dye gland has been pulled out. The overwhelming stink has invaded my mouth and tongue as well as my nose, so I have no idea what this tastes like, but it is hot and filling.
The children slip away. I’m just wondering where we rest for the siesta, when the overseer bellows at me. ‘Over here, Not-a-Priestess!’
He thinks that’s funny. I won’t show him I care.
He points me to a group of people sitting on a flat stone around a pot of murex. ‘Show her what to do,’ he orders.
A one-eyed man dumps the shellfish out of the pot, and hands me a rock.
‘Smash the little ones and throw them back into the pot,’ says a girl, not much older than me. In fact, no one is much older than me. I don’t think there’s a person in the works over twenty summers, not even Pignose.
I pound and pound before I figure out that only the smallest shells can be smashed. If they’re even as long as my thumb the only way to get the dye is by hammering a bronze pin through the side and wiggling the mucky grey gland out through the hole – without pricking yourself with the pin. The hammerers’ fingers are quick and skilled, but they are also bruised and bloody, and most have missing fingernails.
I’m too lowly to be trusted with a pin. My fingers are scratched and sore, but by the end of the day, when the pot is full of thick purple sludge, I still have my fingernails.
The fish stew is served again at sunset. I gulp mine down, and refill the bowl for Mama and Nunu. The cook lets me light a branch at the fire, and with that in one hand and the stew in the other, I head the long way back across the hills. I am so tired I can hardly walk.
Nunu and Mama burst into tears when they see me. ‘Oh, my child!’ says Nunu, as if she’s speaking for them both.
She’s definitely speaking for them both when she adds, ‘Your mother needs you to leave your shift outside for the night. We’ll hang it over the thorn bush to air – I don’t think even a wolf will take it!’
She wraps me in my cloak as I strip off, and takes my stinky shift outside. I stink too, but I’m asleep before they finish eating their stew.
And I leave again in the morning before Mama wakes.
*
I don’t know how I’ve offended the gods
to make them hate me like this
but I must have done something –
or not done something I should –
because the life I’m living
is nearer death than life.
My spirit wanders,
not caring if it’s lost as Mama’s
and never finds my body –
this body that lives in muck
hammering with rocks and bruised fingers,
this body that stumbles in sleep
trudging home to its mama
who cries at its stink.
But Nunu has earned the fishers’ trust,
cares for babies while mothers work,
helps tend the injured and ill,
with Mama by her side
or wandering, watched by all.
The fishers feed them as their own –
they don’t need the stew I carry,
earned with such pain.
Chance finds his own feed,
guards Mama and Nunu at night
and no longer howls when I leave.
the nights it seems easier
to sleep on the slave floor,
knowing I will never be free?
Some days I hear Pellie,
more real than grunting children
or frightened slaves;
more real than me.
She scolds and teases
that her friend is not destined
for a purple life –
she doesn’t say whether
the purple is priesthood or slavery –
and how can she know?
She hasn’t choked on this stink,
hasn’t felt the blow
of a stick on her back
for falling asleep as she works,
hasn’t pounded her fingers
with a hammer of rock,
hasn’t tripped and fallen on a path at night
and lain there till dawn
because her legs won’t move.
And if Pellie knows
how long I’ve been here,
she doesn’t tell me,
though another full moon comes;
maybe another –
and still I don’t bleed.
I know now
I’ll never be a true woman.
But this morning her voice is clear
through the crash of hammers:
‘The goddess calls; Nunu needs you.
You must see your mama.’
‘You’re not an oracle!’ I snap –
One-Eye hears me
but doesn’t care if I’m crazy
as long as I smash my shells.
When the night stew is eaten
I cross the hills
to do what my friend says.
The wailing reaches me far from our hut:
Mama’s high, Nunu’s deeper,
lu-lu-lu-ing the grief of broken hearts –
I don’t know how many times
a heart can break.
‘Traders came today,’ Nunu weeps.
‘The tall goldsmith from our town
is travelling with them,
searching for a place to work his craft.
He said that when the great mother’s belching
had the stink of death
and steam was hissing from her home,
he and as many as could fit
left on the other ships
the dawn before the war of the gods.
‘What the sailors said is true:
it was our island torn apart,
her heartland scattered
and all souls on her
swallowed in fire and ash.’
and again like Mama,
‘No, no, no!
The sailors said
there was no town or harbour
on the island that died!’
‘The earthmother’s fire
spewed rock and ash
from the depths of her belly –
our town and its harbour
are buried deep
under a mountain.’