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Copyright © Shayna Krishnasamy 2009
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of
the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-9813352
Cover image provided by amy_B123 on Flickr,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11158252@N03/.
For Eyal
You are my home
Contents
The little girl squinted up at the giant tree.
It had been calling to her all summer, its grayish trunk catching her eye whenever she
was in the close. When she played with the other village children, or drew water from the well,
her tree always lingered in her mind. It was a maple, with leaves as big as dinner plates and
beards of club moss that swayed in the wind.
They beckoned her.
Today was the day. She placed her foot on the bottommost rung of the ladder and took a
deep breath. She was a good climber. She could have beaten the older boys in their climbing
races, but because she was a girl, and only in her seventh year, they wouldn’t let her compete.
Gazing up, she saw the fog drifting far above her head. No villager had ever climbed all the way
to the canopy.
She’d show them.
It was close to noon when she reached the top of the ladder and wrapped her fingers
around the lowest branch. She pressed her cheek into the bark and inhaled its mossy scent. She
smiled. There was nothing she loved better than a good climb. Holding tight to the branch, she
wedged her knee into the wood and swung her body up, already reaching for the next limb. The
dark skirts of her kirtle swung about her legs.
The climb took most of the day. As she neared the top of the tree, she stopped to catch her
breath, her legs and arms shaking from the strain. The canopy was almost close enough to touch.
She felt a rush of exhilaration. She’d told herself that reaching the top of the tree was her utmost
desire, but secretly she’d cherished another wish: to look for the first time into the face of the
sky. She wiped the sweat from her face with her father’s work gloves. Just a few feet more …
Not long after, as far below her father took his first notice of her absence, the top of the
little girl’s head brushed against the leaves of the canopy. Dizzy with excitement, she braced her
foot against the highest branch, grabbed hold of the leaves above, and pushed her face into the
open air. Then she let out a scream so strong it was heard from one end of the village to the
other.
Her father caught her as she fell and ran with her in his arms to the home of the village
healer, bursting through her door as she was serving supper to her family. They laid the little
girl down on the table.
The healer hunched over the girl as her father held his breath. When she finally looked
up at him, he knew. She couldn’t meet his eyes.
“The sun’s rays were too much for her.” She laid her hand on the girl’s forehead. “She
is blind,” she said.
There were days when she would go from morning to night without speaking to another human soul. In those rare mid-morning lulls, when for a moment there were no tasks to tend to, she would run her fingers over her father’s old tunic and winter cloak, both thick with dust, and imagine that the five years since she’d last seen him had never been, and that at any moment she would hear his off-tune whistle as he came in from the fields. At times she felt as though she’d spent her whole life waiting – for her father’s return, for the thaw to come, for the bread to rise, for her life to change – and always in silence, always alone. When the villagers came to her cottage door and called for her, there were times when she started, for she hardly recognized the sound of her own name.
“It isn’t natural,” Maude Quigg commented to her daughter, Roana, as they came away from the girl’s toft, their arms full of the bread she’d baked and the tunics she’d sewn or mended. “Always alone like that, always in the dark, not even a candle. It can’t be healthy.”
“What’s Shallah need a candle for?” Roana asked, dropping a pair of brown hose as she struggled with her load.
“Keep your voice down, girl!” Maude risked a glance behind. “Do you want her to hear you?”
Roana rolled her eyes.
“There’s nothing wrong with her ears,” her mother warned.
Bending down to grab the hose, Roana thought she spied the hem of a red kirtle withdrawing into the trees.
“Come on, Ma,” she said brusquely, setting the pace. “Let’s get out of here.”
Only once they’d disappeared down the lane did Shallah emerge from her hiding place and wander back through her yard, scattering the hens. It was an old habit – slipping out the back door of her cottage and following after the villagers as they left, eavesdropping on their talk. Once upon a time she’d felt it necessary, back in the days when she’d been a newly orphaned girl, when there’d been talk of taking her to live in one of the village homes, against her will. These days, she hardly ever heard anything worth hearing.
Darkness! Shallah thought to herself, shaking her head. What nonsense.
Maude Quigg was a busybody and a gossip, and likely various tales of Shallah’s unhealthy habits would be circulating about the village by sundown. Were Shallah herself to set foot on the village green that night, she’d be followed at every step by whispers, some sympathetic, and others much less so. Many of the villagers thought it odd that she’d not yet married, though she’d reached her eighteenth year; that she kept her own toft, though she was only a woman. Others went so far as to claim she’d gone mad in her isolation, pointing to her untidy dress, to the twigs and leaves in her hair. Mostly they simply disliked her, for she wouldn’t accept their pity and shunned their company, preferring to keep to herself.
Closing her door tightly behind her, Shallah sighed with relief. Their barbed opinions couldn’t follow her here. This was her home, and none could enter without her say so, a fact she cherished. Here she could be herself without worry of scorn. Here she could escape the village and all its inhabitants, and here alone. For, there was nowhere else to go.
An outsider might have called Trallee the dark village, for darkness was its constant companion. It sat in the heart of a deep wood, overshadowed on all sides by trees as tall as the highest hills with trunks as wide as homes. Far above the ground, their branches wound together to create a canopy so thick that naught but a few rays of light could flow through. The villagers had come to fear sunlight above all, and shunned its emergence through the branches, cursing its warmth. They taught their children to run from beams of light, to retreat indoors at the slightest sign of brightness. On sunny days, when it was possible to see from one end of the village to the other, the villagers went about with their hoods drawn, their faces averted from the awful glare.
It was a secluded place. The villagers never thought of leaving Trallee’s confines, for the forest was said to be full of dangers. Only one of their lot had ever set foot outside the village, a desperate choice made in the days of famine, when the rain wouldn’t come, and the crops wouldn’t grow.
He left a little girl behind.
And he never returned.
Shallah stoked the fire in the hearth and set a pot of water to boil, being sure to sit back as she peeled the onions so the skirts of her kirtle wouldn’t be set alight. She’d a special affection for this dress, for it once had belonged to her mother. She’d sewn it herself when she was a girl, her crooked stitches evidence of her impatience with the work, and secretly Shallah believed she’d chosen to have the wool dyed red to irk her father and draw the attention of all the boys in the village. It was a fanciful story, one Shallah treasured, though she knew it to be a creation of her own mind. She knew next to nothing of her mother. She’d died in childbirth, leaving her shy husband with a squalling babe in his arms and a broken heart.
As she left the vegetable pottage to simmer, Shallah realized the air in the room was awfully close and smoky. It dawned on her that she might have forgotten to unshutter the windows that morning, and here it was, nearly suppertime. As she made for the door she almost plowed right into Jupp, her jersey cow, who mooed disapprovingly.
“Oh, Jupp,” Shallah said, pulling playfully on her ear, “couldn’t you have told me I left the windows shuttered? Is that too much to ask?”
Jupp followed his mistress out the door and ambled off into the close, her contented chewing soon joined by the squeals and snorts of Dobbin, Shallah’s pig. If they got along well today they would both stay in the byre for the night, though on most days some petty argument between the two meant the cow had to be kept in the house.
In truth, Shallah enjoyed the company, and there was certainly space enough in the house. Her father had been ambitious in his plans for his first home. It was a house built by an eager young man for himself and his pregnant wife, a house for a new family. The wattle and daub structure sat amidst a hanging garden of club moss, the maple beards trailing so low as to obscure the windows on rainy days when the moss sagged with the weight of water. It was the only home in the village not built around the village green. Her father had been a man of few words and awkward manners and the main attraction of this toft had been that to reach the fields he didn’t have to pass through the village and suffer through daily chats with restless wives and jovial neighbours. Best of all, he could circumvent their compassion, for a widower with a girl to raise is certainly a cause for pity.
In some ways, Shallah mused, she and her father were just the same.
As afternoon gave way to evening, she took her usual seat on a rickety stool in the croft, her eyes closed against the everlasting dark. She might remain there for an hour at least, her skirts pulled over her knees, breathing in the earthy scent of the herbs budding at her feet and the evergreen needles pinning her hair.
Unbidden, her thoughts wandered to the lanes and ditches of Trallee. She hadn’t always shunned those lanes. She’d loved the place once, long ago. She’d loved its trees – the firs and spruces dotting the newly-plowed fields, the redwoods towering over the village homes, and her own lovely maple with its changing leaves. If only she could have gone on loving them forever, her life might have had a different course.
If only she hadn’t been forced to pay so high a price.
After her fall, Shallah’s father had been much accused. For years the villager mothers had overlooked his half-hearted parenting, for he’d been lost in grief for much of Shallah’s babyhood, but this was the last straw. If only he’d listened to them when they’d told him to forbid her to climb. If only he’d kept a closer watch on her. If only he’d broken her independent spirit, perhaps her sight could have been saved, perhaps she might still be whole.
But Shallah didn’t blame her father for her blindness. She knew she would have made the climb regardless, for she was stubborn and determined, and wouldn’t be cowed. It was those same vices that got her through the first black years. They helped her hold her head high as the other children jeered when she tripped over a stone or walked into a fence. They helped her comfort her forlorn father who couldn’t fathom how everything had gone so wrong.
And they held her up when he disappeared, taking his tears with him.
Shallah shook her head briskly. She hadn’t thought about those days in years, and didn’t know why they’d come to mind now. She’d spent the five years since her father’s departure determined that she wouldn’t be defined by the calamities of her past, that she be able to live her life as she wished. Now, sitting serenely in her own toft, not a trace of her troubled childhood could be found on her freckled face. She’d come a long way from her first tentative steps in a new dark world, her hands held out before her, to her current pastime of exploring the forest by night, getting to know the wood by heart, to know the placement of each root and stone.