Shadowed By Wings (26 page)

Again the Retainers at the door watched me with greedy anticipation. The plump eunuch perfunctorily kowtowed to them and pushed to the head of the line of women.

We followed him along one moisture-slick corridor to a set of stone stairs, climbed them, turned left down another corridor, then right down another. I longed to collapse. The boy holding me pinched me to keep me awake and moving.

We arrived at two stone latrines, stinking and perched at the end of a corridor like two crumbling thrones. No doors on those latrines. We were required to void bladder and bowel in full view of all.

Then back to the viagand chambers, whereupon the boy led me to one of the many small stone burrows notched in the circumference of the vaulted central chamber. Only shadow and darkness granted the burrow privacy; no doors or curtains existed across its entrance. Not that the entrance needed much in the way of concealment beyond shadow, for it reached only my knees, it was that low, and I had to kneel to crawl into the dank place. You’d have thought I would have balked, after so many weeks in Prelude. You’d have thought I would have been deathly afraid to squeeze myself into a dark, unknown place so cramped that my head brushed the slick stone as I crawled within. But I did nothing of the sort. I was too exhausted, too overwhelmed, to summon the energy and wit required for defiance. Thus I began submitting to the will of my jailers.

Inside the burrow: darkness, mildewed cushions, and the scent of venom so strong it seemed as if I knelt not in a stone den but in the venom sacs of an intact dragon. I lay down upon those mildewed cushions and curled into an infant’s position.

“Drink this,” the eunuch murmured. His bulk was crouched in the entrance to my burrow, silhouetted by the greenish jungle light trickling through the central chamber’s casements. “Take it, Naji; drink. To ease your aches, to help you sleep. Drink.”

He thrust a gourd at me. A citric tang wafted from it. Venom.

With trembling hands, I reached for the draft.

The venom blazed down my throat, and my eyes stung and itched as if rubbed with coarse salt, then streamed tears. My nostrils burned as if coated with chili paste. Lusty heat radiated through my groin.

Bliss.

“Thank you,” I gasped, overwhelmed with gratitude toward he who held me prisoner. “Thank you.”

The eunuch chuckled benignly and took the empty gourd from me. I closed my eyes and sank back onto the damp cushions. They felt as soft as down. I was floating on them. The burrow was constricting no longer. It cradled me gently, like a mother’s arms. Cradled me and rocked. I sighed, contented.

Then, for the first time since being arrested in the dragonmaster’s stables, I slept. Truly slept. Unhindered by my mother’s haunt.

THIRTEEN

T
he next clawful of days fell into a routine of draft-induced sleep punctuated by the plump eunuch’s summons to eat. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d slept so much. Not since I was a child in the pottery clan compound, certainly. I luxuriated in venom-induced sleep at night, wallowed in it during the day, felt glutted yet greedy for more. Oh, haunt-free bliss! Oh, black escape!

I spoke with no one during those days, and no one spoke with me, either. Each day passed like the one previous: We were spoon-fed by the eunuchs and rewarded accordingly with water rations; we were led to the latrines, then returned to the viagand chambers. We slept.

Sometimes as I slept, I roused slightly, heard the merry whistling of the boy eunuch as he dusted or swept or scraped lichen from the walls. Now and then I heard apathetic voices in brief conversation. To sharpen a venom-dulled mind so that it could better interpret the dragons’ memories, the plump eunuch occasionally badgered a woman into splashing paint onto a canvas in a parody of creating art, or harassed her into a game of darali abin famoo with the destiny wheel. But mostly, all I heard was a wilted, damp silence that clogged the ears like sodden chaff. We all lay in our little caves sleeping, see. Immersed in escape.

Sometimes, other noises penetrated my slumber.

Recognizable sounds, they were, which, upon waking, I realized must be the coo of wild doves, the whisk of feathers across stone, the wet slap of frond against frond.

Those sounds came to me in the form of dreams, woven with the golden threads of memory: I dreamed of the mating shack in my birth clan. I dreamed of its paper-wall cubicles, of the gasps and groans and wet, gentle slaps I’d heard as a child when sleeping in a cubicle across from my parents, during those sultry nights they joined each other there.

In the beginning, the sounds were comforting. They evoked the security and warmth of a childhood long lost.

But as the days and nights stretched on, the sounds began provoking adult emotions within me, magnified a hundredfold by the venom in my veins. My sleep was no longer restful then. I’d dream of Dono pawing at my breasts, kneeling while I stood, tonguing me so that I arched and clawed his hair with insatiable want.

And I took to examining the women about me, each time we gathered for feeding.

Did they feel the same as I did, whenever they curled in their burrows? Were they gripped with the ache, the loneliness, the need that only venom and dragon union could alleviate? I couldn’t tell, from looking at them. The women gazed at ground or wall, studiously avoided conversation, touch, and each other’s eyes.

I wondered which of the two women who had helped me lie down before Greatmother for instruction, upon my arrival in the viagand, had brushed her lips across my forehead. I wished I had paid more attention to who was whom, but alas, they’d all looked alike to me.

Not now.

They did not look the same, not at all. Yes, they moved more or less in the same lifeless shuffle, and yes, their eyes bore the mark of the dragons’ poison. But as the days dripped into each other, I realized that each damp face differed from the other, and that those who had been in the viagand longest looked palest, moved slowest, had suffered the most drastic hair loss, burned with the fiercest thirst, and displayed the least interest in food.

Greatmother looked eldest, by mere dint of her missing teeth and the gray so heavily streaking her long, thin hair. Yet a core of purest steel seemed to hold her erect, and I realized that determination to survive her imprisonment as long as she might, coupled with her absolute belief in the justice of her situation, made her the most formidable person I’d ever met.

Sutkabde and Kabdekazonvia, Sixty-seven and Seventy-two Girls, looked like figures made of melting tallow, and their eyes, surrounded by swollen, serum-weeping flesh, were harrowing. But whereas Kabdekazonvia seemed unable to eat more than a morsel here, a nibble there, Sutkabde would allow the plump eunuch to spoon exactly as much food into her mouth as Greatmother had eaten. Often, she’d gag in the process. Once, she retched up all she’d swallowed. Prinrut swiftly and quietly announced such waste a transgression.

Prinrut, the newest arrival save for me, looked and acted almost normal. I say almost, for she suffered a tendency to fall into short spells of fear-induced catatonia; fear, after resignation, hung as thick as the scent of venom in the chamber’s air. Prinrut’s shoulder-length hair had a tendency to curl about her face in a disarray that softened her pallor and hid the reddened skin around her eyes. Her meek voice gave the impression that before her imprisonment, she may have been a comely, plump, docile sort. I wondered what crime she’d been accused of, that she’d ended up in such a prison.

Misutvia, Eighty-six Girl—also relatively new, going by the numerical order of her name—was also least marked by her time in the viagand. Occasionally color would flood her high cheekbones, most usually while pouncing on any transgression Greatmother inadvertently performed. I oft felt that Misutvia ceaselessly watched the rest of us beneath her jet-black bangs, cut so severely and attractively in a straight line across her forehead. Her posture while reclining upon a divan during feeding was always provocative, almost defiant: one arm draped above her head, breasts out-thrust, one leg dangling over the divan, shapely calf exposed. In this respect, she reminded me of my sister Waivia, though with her frighteningly bloodshot eyes, deathly pallor, and languid walk, there could be no mistaking the one for the other.

As quick as Misutvia was to pounce on any transgression Greatmother performed, I noticed that she never claimed the responsibility of reporting the transgressions performed by other women. Ever.

With each passing day, my regard for Misutvia increased. In her treatment of all save Greatmother, she was ethical and sane. Occasionally, I noticed her realizing that a transgression against someone had gone unclaimed; I’d watch her struggle with the conflict of wanting to claim that transgression for herself, yet time and time again, she would choose not to.

Those transgressions, hey-o. They ranged from the outrageous to the unfathomable, and I flinched each time a woman claimed one against another.

“Greatmother, I noticed you didn’t have a bowel movement today. You’re failing the dragons and the daronpuis by allowing yourself to fall into ill health. This, surely, is a transgression. I claim the right to report it.”

“Misutvia, you slept uneasily during the night; you kept others awake. This endangers their health. I claim the right to report this transgression.”

“Prinrut, you suffered a catatonic spell during feeding this noon. You missed a meal.”

“Kabdekazonvia, you ate even less today than you did yesterday.”

“Sutkabde, you haven’t engaged in creative expression for a clawful of days. Such mental laxity is remiss; it encourages sloth and physical deterioration.”

Hearing those transgressions was an instruction for me. I ensured that I moved my bowels once each day, regardless of how much straining it required. I scraped dry, clotted paint onto a canvas to avoid the transgression of mental laxity. I ate heartily, even though my appetite decreased with each venom draft the plump eunuch gave me. I took to stretching my limbs in the presence of others, prior to each noon feast, so that I couldn’t be accused of not recovering from Prelude fast enough to please the daronpuis.

As I said, at all other times I curled into my stone burrow and escaped from life through sleep.

That was the safest way of dealing with the monstrosity of my situation: ignoring the reality of it as much as I could, much the same way, I suppose, that Prinrut did each time she plunged into catatonia.

But I couldn’t completely avoid the whole issue of transgression reporting, for each evening, after being force-fed dinner, any woman who had claimed a transgression against another during the day would stand before the plump eunuch. He would solemnly mark the transgression in a ledger with a quill, dipping it meticulously in an inferior inkwell whose gray glaze had crazed during firing in the kiln. He’d mark down both the name of the transgressor and that of the woman who had reported the transgression.

I surmised that it was a tally system of sorts, whereby informing on others decreased whatever demerits had been logged against one on prior days, or earned one a merit to be used in the future, should there be no demerits scribed next to one’s name. I didn’t ask when or how the recorded transgressions would be turned into punishments, and, by staying in my little cave at all times except meals and my brief forays to scrape paint upon a canvas, I avoided the company of others who might inform me of such.

I knew, though. I knew how important those tallied transgressions were.

I knew by the way each woman reacted when caught committing a violation, guessed that the eventual punishment would be no mere knuckle caning. Each time a violation was claimed against a woman, the transgressor would freeze. Stare fixedly at the air. Remain so for long moments while a frantic pulse beat visibly in neck or temple. Each such trance would end with noiseless tears or a paroxysm of shudders.

Their fear created my own.

I took great care to remain well fed, silent, and mostly unseen.

Then, deep into a humid, honeysuckle-sweet night when the first monsoon of the Wet thundered outside, I committed my first transgression, and I committed it with a hungry passion that astonished me.

I was asleep, and then I was not, staring at the slick cave ceiling mere inches above me, uncertain whether it was star-flecked night I gazed into or quartz-flecked rock. Maybe it was both. It felt that way, at the time, the enclosure of rock as immutable as endless sky, the flecks of quartz as hypnotic and scintillating as starlight.

Something had woken me, a feeling, a presentiment. A presence that whispered something forbidden and unknown into my ear. My name? Not that, no, even though I’d been prohibited from speaking it to any. Yet the feeling pulsing over me, emanating from the little mouth of my stone burrow, was as familiar as my name, as forbidden as such.

I turned my head. A figure crouched at the entrance to my burrow, a hand’s breadth away.

I held my breath and realized, belatedly, that I’d been practicing solitary intimacy in my sleep again: my thighs were spread, the fingers of one of my hands satiny with my brine.