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I’ll admit I’m sentimental about Dead Horse Island. It was a good place to be a little girl. Of course, I was the only child of a rich woman, but even our factory girls got time to go beachcombing. I had my dead man to carry me everywhere, so I could pick berries, or fly my kites on the uplands (in the winter when there were no raiders expected), or swim in a tide pool at a safe distance from the dye works, or play the flutes that Daddy brought home from his raids. One was ivory, with tooth-prints in the gold mouthpiece, and “IO” etched on the end. I thought Io must be a girl about my age, and that I’d find her and make friends with her one day.
All my memories of the island are lush with grass and covered in sheep, or else knee-deep in snow sparkling under the sun, with the sea bursting in rainbow spray on the south cliffs and running green and glassy past the cove. But we didn’t live there because it was pretty. We lived there to boil dyes and drugs. On an island you’ve got constant winds, strong tides, and no neighbors. I grew up thinking everyone’s Mommy was in charge of a team of scarred women in breathing filters, hoods, and gloves, who worked in shifts for weeks on end. The young girls had dark places under their eyes from losing sleep, and the old women had spatter scars. It was mostly dyes in the winters: paper-wrapped bricks that all looked black but could turn wool purple or shocking yellow. In the summer, if Mommy’s factors succeeded in their bargains overseas, our women would refine a whole cargo of seeds into a brown grit like failed fudge. (That was resin. It would kill you if you fell in the vat, and make your muscles go slack if you put your chapped fingers on the dasher. The addicts at the other end of our chain of business took a grain the size of a pinprick steamed in water, no more than once a week, in order to not die.)
My Daddy was a grinning man who sailed the Whistlepig out of the eastern sea a couple of times a year, anchored in our cove, and charged ashore with his crew (all of whom had lovers among our women). He would hang gold around our necks and fill Mommy’s arms with silk made for other women, and lavish hugs and stubbly kisses on us. Everyone would bathe for the first time in months, and we’d sing and hold a clambake, and then the adults would hold a figurative clambake after they thought the younger girls and I were asleep. The party could last for weeks. Then we would pack the hold of the Whistlepig with casks of resin wrapped in wool, or dyes made watertight with wax, and Daddy and his boys would be gone as suddenly as they arrived. The dyes went to Mommy’s agents in other countries, and gold and goods would come back, in Daddy’s hold. When I asked her where the drugs went, she said, to armies, so they could fight without being tired or hungry.
All the grown-ups would carry me around, making much of me, when Daddy visited. The sailors loved me. Those gnarly men would coo over me as if I was a newborn kitten, even up to the time I was twelve. That was easy, because I was half the size I should have been, and sickly, and blue.
When I was six, I got sick and nearly died. After that, my skin was slate-blue and I was too frail to walk far. If I stood up quickly, my nose would bleed and I’d faint. I went from being an active child to “I suppose this is my life,” with no resentment in between. I was just too tired.
Mommy thought of the obvious cause. None of our women lived to get old (there was an island burying ground that doubled its size during my childhood) and we were always losing this or that new girl because she picked her nose while tending vats. Mommy was racked with guilt that I might be another casualty of the business. She burned her clothes, had everything movable dragged out of the fort and burned or boiled, and tested our food and drink on the youngest factory girls. No one else changed color or fell ill. And even Mommy admitted we didn’t use chemicals that would turn skin blue.
It was possible I had a childhood illness no one had ever seen before. More likely, I was under a curse. Those were the days. Mommy and Daddy had enemies in other countries. You could make the case that they’d ruined a lot of lives, if you hold them responsible for the actions of drug addicts, which I don’t, necessarily. Someone with the evil eye could have said “Your child will suffer for what you’ve done,” or some warlord could have called down the wrath of the gods of that country. Daddy put time and money into curse-breaking, and sacrificed to every god we knew. It didn’t make me less blue or shaky.
If it was a curse it would have had to come from overseas. Everyone who worked for Mommy and Daddy loved me, and the only other person on the island was the Learned Master Doctress, who’d never met me.
(She rented the stone barn on the far shore. She was there for the same reason my parents had moved to the island: privacy, strong winds, and sea currents to carry dirty things offshore. Mommy called her “an impractical chemist” with a sneer. I was forbidden to go near her. Sometime before I was born, she’d given Daddy a lot of gold to set her down on the far shore with equipment and preserved foods and a fresh-water distiller, and she’d been there ever since, so she must have been a tough old lady. I saw her in the distance sometimes, and was impressed at how fat she was and how her white hair streamed whichever way the wind blew.)
That’s why I had a dead man. You can call them whatever euphemism is going around these days. Corpse, walker, zombie, cold one, Johnbeloved. That last one started as a joke because of the song about the dead lover. These days, people remember the euphemism and forget the song. They’ve mostly worn out or run down now, and some families have one propped in the shed. If you ever find a usable Johnbeloved for sale, buy it and I will reimburse you, because it’s either been gently used by one careful owner since before the war, or there’s an ill-walker around who has to be caught, tried, and hanged. When I was little, dead men were expensive but within the means of a smuggler married to a drug boiler.
When I was seven, Daddy brought him home from foreign parts. I thought Johnbeloved was just his name, and I loved him. He was big even for a foreigner, and clad in worn clothes from the last age. His tunic was sewn to his trews, which were stitched to the tops of his boots, like a soldier doll that no one could undress. The same seamstress had sewn his lips shut with X-shaped black stitches. He had the mustache and side-whiskers and braided hair that mercenaries wear in the old prints, but he looked old and his face was set in a scowl. His eyes were matte white, like sea glass.
“Tell him what to do, and he’ll do it, honeybunch,” said my father.
“Gimme a piggyback ride,” I said.
Johnbeloved hoisted me as if I was a knapsack, and I told him to walk up to the high sheepfold. He marched right off up the grassy hills at the center of the island. I made him run in circles up there. He did it. He was tireless. He did everything I said. My heart sang with power when I rode on his back. It was my first taste of absolute rule.
It was the best thing Daddy ever did. Johnbeloved made me able to enjoy my childhood. Once our women got over their fear of his gray scowling face, they accepted he would be carrying me everywhere, and treated him like an extension of me. I could even go out alone with him, though Mommy saw the inherent dangers.
“Say it after me,” she told me. ” ‘By the god my people swear by, I will never tell Johnbeloved to kill anyone, harm anyone, or walk into the ocean or the boiler rooms or out of sight of the fort, unless Mommy says I’m allowed to do it.'”
Most of those things hadn’t crossed my mind till then. “I wouldn’t do it anyway.”
“Good,” said Mommy. “Then it’ll be no hardship to promise.”
I gave my word in awe. (I know the done thing these days is to say the names of your gods all over the place, but we knew enough to be cautious, and I hope I’ve instilled that in you. Be tactful till you land the blow.)
Johnbeloved didn’t show the years, despite hard usage (charging uphill and down, hauling stones in the summer and snow in the winter, beachcombing on the shores of our cove among the glass chunks and debris of wrecks). He looked worn but serviceable when I was seven, and he looked the same when I was twelve and nearly ruined him.
It was New Year’s Day, Daddy hadn’t been home for many months, and Mommy and her women were trying to rejoice and drink and start the games of chance even though no one was in the mood. People kept leaving the fort and glancing out to sea in case the menfolk showed up after all. Mommy looked gorgeous. She’d loaded gold bracelets on her white arms and dressed in a gown that was yellow down to her waist and green below that, with a flame-colored mantle over that. She had a little frown between her eyebrows. We sang a few songs, and Mommy threw dice, and we all started betting with seashells, but our hearts weren’t in it.
We had a few men and boys around all the time. Some of them were old and Daddy had gotten the best years out of them, but a few were young and maimed but otherwise ready for anything. Some of the girls got up and danced with the only boy in the room. His name was Niall, and he’d lost one arm in Foreign Parts, so Daddy wouldn’t let him on the ship any longer. He helped in the factory but didn’t have the prospect of anything else. It wasn’t so much that he was good-looking, as that he was the only boy near my age when I felt longing for the first time. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I wanted to murder the women who were touching him, and I threw down my flute.
“Niall,” I said. “Come here.”
He was scared to disobey. He left a gap among the dancers, and came and stood over me by the fire.
“Scared to dance with me?” I said.
He had no idea what to say.
“Dance for us both,” I said, and grabbed his cloak. It was all he wore above the waist. I fell forward onto him, and his ribs and back were hot and sweaty from dancing. I can still see my little-kid arms sliding around his middle, and feel him cringe away. I lost my grip and slid onto the flagstones, and my party clothes bunched up, so for a moment I showed everyone my legs.
The women around us were laughing. My mother wasn’t. She rose like a beautiful bear going up on its hind legs, and snarled at me, “Cover yourself!”
She had not taught me modesty. It had never occurred to me that I was capable of being immodest. I’d never made the opportunity before. Yet there she was, acting as if I was betraying a lifetime of training.
Mommy tore into Niall for being rude to me, and told off the women for laughing. As soon as she was scolding them instead of me, I called Johnbeloved and made him carry me outside. She called after me as we left, but Johnbeloved carried me across the courtyard to the sea gate. Only there did I tell him to set me down. My rainbow-colored silk dress was stained red down the front before I noticed I’d incurred a nosebleed.
A small path led zigzag down the cliffs to the boat launch, and a larger path led to the right, to the upper entrance of the drug works. I thought about making him take me in there, just to show I could do what I wanted. But it was unbearable to break my word even in anger. People would never trust you again if you went back on your word. Mommy had managed to teach me that.
Instead, I got out my scissors (we all wore knives and scissors at our belts, in those days, even on fancy occasions) and I started taking out my feelings on Johnbeloved. I had the twisted idea that by hook or by crook, I would see a naked man that night.
What happened was that I cut three of the stitches in his tunic seam, and he fell over. There was no attempt to catch himself. He toppled back like a felled tree and lay on the path, unresponsive to my yells.
I thought I’d killed him. Mommy and the others came out and found me crying over Johnbeloved so that tears, snot and blood dripped out of my nose. Mommy comforted me. You would hardly have known her for the same woman she’d been earlier. She set different women to mend the stitches, but no matter how carefully they sewed the tunic back down in place, Johnbeloved wouldn’t start moving again.
In the morning, Mommy sent Niall and two of the younger women across the island for the Learned Master Doctress. I was ashamed of myself at last.
They didn’t return till the afternoon. By then, I’d cried myself dry.
The Learned Master Doctress walked with a limping swagger. She wore a lot of blue shawls piled on top of each other, and she had wrapped her white hair in a blue turban held down with long silver pins. She showed her ugly old teeth in a grin at Mommy.
“Jesus Christ, I’m dying of thirst,” she said in her braying voice. “Can someone bring me beer out here?” She sat on the stone step.
Everyone eyed her. Our women would never sit till my mother sat first. Mommy herself was courteous and good-humored and had the old men bring beer from the vat we reserved for Daddy. They brought her big chair out of the hall and she sat opposite the Learned Master Doctress.
“We’ll talk here,” she said. “Get about the day’s work.” Some of the women went to the vats (it was a dye season, so their hands were purple), some to distilling, some to fish and some to refuel the beacon tower. The old woman carrying me tried to take me indoors, but I sat right down on the grit of the courtyard, by Johnbeloved, and held his cold hand.
Mommy and the Learned Master Doctress were far enough away that I couldn’t hear a word of the conversation that followed, but it went on for a long time and Mommy looked at me with big sad eyes from time to time. The Learned Master Doctress drank a quart of beer, swigging it like a fishwife.
Mother ended it by rising and clapping her hands for her own women. The Doctress heaved herself up and swagger-limped to Johnbeloved and me with the horn cup still in her hand.
“You’re not cutting into him,” I said, crouching over the body.
“No need,” said the Doctress. Then she threw a splash of beer on Johnbeloved’s face and said, “Here, Jack, take this drip-drap and pour it down thy flip-flap, and stand up and fight again.”
He sat up, dripping beer. He got to his feet.
“Embrace me,” I said. He gave me the same stiff hug as always. I made him piggyback me, and he did it just as neatly as before. It was such a relief that I shouted “Hooray!”
“Stop screaming, kid,” said the Doctress. “If I knew it was that… important to you, I’d have done it first.” She had, not an accent, but a struggle to find words. “Can you walk?”
“Not really.” I was barely taking notice of her, I was so happy. “I’ve been sick since forever. Johnbeloved, march!”
We strode around the Learned Master Doctress.
“What do you like to do?” she said.
“Run wild on the island.” I felt her laying a trap. “In a few years I’ll be old enough to go on a voyage with Daddy, and then I’ll come back here and rule this place like Mommy does. Him and Mommy are going to buy all the other islands and conquer the ones that won’t.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said the Doctress. “I’m eighty-nine, how old are you?”
“Twelve,” I said.
“Oh, that’s great.” I could see she’d thought I was half that age. “I hear you like boys.”
I was sick of being grilled. “I want to put my legs around Niall, and I don’t want everyone to scold me about it all the time.”
“Damn,” said the Doctress. “Many girls down the ages have known such conflict. Good luck, and don’t pick holes in that guy’s stitches.” She hobbled off.
“Wait!” I said. “What do I do about the beer on him?”
“Let him dry out,” she brayed.
Mommy loaned the Doctress our goat-cart to drive home across the island, as a mark of respect. Then she left it with the Doctress for three days, till I asked her when she would bring it back. It was unlike Mommy to let anyone keep her things for a long time, even when she had no use for them.
“I’d like to send you to fetch it back, with Johnbeloved,” said Mommy. She looked me in the face for the first time since the New Year. It was a pitying look that meant I’d fallen short of the mark. I wanted her to approve of me again, but my proud heart wouldn’t let me beg her pardon for lusting after Niall, so I was stuck. “I want you to go see if she can do anything about your frailness,” Mommy went on, and I saw in horror that her eyes were full of tears.
“I’ll do whatever I have to do to be strong,” I said.
“You’ll have to go see her first thing tomorrow morning,” said Mommy, “and not tell any of the women, or they’ll try and stop you. Just you and me and Johnbeloved know this. Promise?” (I promised. Since then, I have been released from my promise, but I kept faith with her while I could.) “I’ll give you a letter to take to her. You have to go to her fasting in the morning, with only a drink of water. If you eat breakfast, she might not be able to help you. And you have to do whatever she says, while you’re there. She means the best for you.”
I thought the Doctress was nothing but a rude old woman, and I nodded.
I think Mommy had never imagined that I would want to act like a grown woman one day. When she saw it happening, it hit her like a ten-ton rock. For someone who could think years ahead in terms of business, she had a lot of gaps in her understanding of people.
The next morning, Mommy woke and dressed me and put my boots on before dawn. She gave me a letter for the Doctor, on best vellum sealed with red wax, rolled around what felt like a stack of tablets. That must be payment for the cure, and it weighed like resin, so Mommy was giving the Doctress huge riches on my behalf and trusting me to convey them. It felt like she was forgiving me and trusting me again. I swore to myself not to fail her. I kissed her, and scuttled out the back way to the hillside (I could walk short distances as long as I hung onto walls). Johnbeloved was standing under the eaves, with the morning dew glinting on his stubbly beard as it did on the grass outside. I climbed onto his back and sent him striding up our hill, over the rocky crags, among the bare trees, to the rolling grassland in the middle of the island. In my pocket was a letter from Mommy with three wax seals showing the crest of her family, a serpent eating an egg.
It was a beautiful autumn morning. I know I said it had just been New Year’s Day. Back in the old times, the year ended with the summer. Bright mornings, foggy nights, and the likelihood of raiders decreasing day by day. Daddy would be home from his own raiding as the bad weather began.
I sang to myself, and Johnbeloved swung along the hills. There was no path, but the sheep kept the grass cropped so short that it was easy terrain. The flocks scattered away as we came along. Most animals were frightened of Johnbeloved. A few vultures were turning on the air currents overhead. Whenever we were outdoors, they circled and looked puzzled.
Dead Horse Island must have been about a mile across. It seemed like a continent — more than that, a world full of mystery and danger. I’d never been so far from home without a living person, but with Johnbeloved under me, I felt brave. The light on the sea was dazzling. When Johnbeloved reached the highest hilltop, I made him stop while I scanned the horizon for Daddy’s ship, or for incoming raids, or for monsters in the deep. Nothing. The ocean was bare, but full of blue and purple shadows. Back the way we’d come, the watchtower stuck up lean and gray. Ahead, I saw the peaked roof of the barn in the distance at the cliffs.
“Walk on,” I said to Johnbeloved.
He lurched down a ravine, into a lot of thorny bushes. I shouted to stop, as they were snagging his legs. It was unlike him to choose rough terrain. Normally I didn’t have to direct him much; I would point and say “Walk!” and he would get where we were going.
He stood in raspberry bushes up to his hips. My pristine white boots were just above the thorns. The sun made the raspberries glow. I grabbed a cluster and put them in my mouth.
They were sweet and sour and just a touch bitter, and I could feel each tiny globe burst. My hands and eyes wanted them as if they were rubies. They were hollow like little thimbles when I popped them off their twigs. I’d eaten handfuls, and was picking seeds out of my teeth when I remembered: the Learned Master Doctress! I’d sworn to go there fasting!
No. Mommy hadn’t made me swear. But she’d told me the journey had to be made fasting, and I’d forgotten. I burst into tears and hit Johnbeloved’s shoulder with my little blue fist stained purple.
He walked into another raspberry bush and waited for me to keep eating.
What I wanted was to go home and beg Mommy’s pardon, but that was impossible, since I had to fetch the goat-cart. Knowing that, I decided to lick the raspberry juice off my fingers and go on to the Doctress, pretending I’d complied. She couldn’t possibly know whether I’d eaten just by looking at me.
Johnbeloved had evidently held some rank in the war, because he had come to us with one ornament, a brass gorget. That was the name for a metal plate on a chain around his neck. I always kept it polished. Now I pulled it over his shoulder and looked at myself in it. My pointy blue face had sinister red teeth. I licked them clean and scrubbed my mouth on my sleeves (violet sleeves on which the stains didn’t show).
After that, it was all downhill to the stone barn on the outer shore. The Learned Master Doctress was sitting outside in a canvas chair, watching the sea and knitting a scarf out of sky-blue yarn that must have been spun by one of our girls. Even at a distance I could see the scarf was crooked and laddering from dropped stitches. It was a waste of wool, but I was too polite to comment. The goat-cart stood by the end of the house, and the white goats, Sukey and Tawdry, were eating the long rank grass like they’d been in a famine.
She was so preoccupied that when I called out “Good morning, Master Doctress!” from fifty yards off, the shock startled her up out of her chair and she dropped the needles. She looked at me with her fists up as if we were going to fight. The goats sprinted off into the distance.
“It’s only Johnbeloved, you’ve seen him before,” I said.
“And you’re the little blue girl who will be queen one day,” said the Doctress, still ill at ease. “What are you doing here?”
“We need the cart back. You should have penned up the goats. And Mommy sent you this, and said you were to examine me.” I urged Johnbeloved closer and placed the letter in her hand. It was odd she was so distressed by Johnbeloved, after she’d examined him unmoved at our fort, but it must be different seeing him unexpectedly.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “He won’t hurt anybody. Johnbeloved, set me down!”
He placed me on my feet as gently as if I’d been made of eggshells. I kept my balance by gripping his tunic.
“Do you want to see his trick?” I said.
“His, uh… Certainly, what the hell,” said the Learned Master Doctress.
I looked up to make sure everything was in order. There were the birds, circling against the sun. My eyes watered.
“Johnbeloved!”
His blank eyes met mine. He was strong but that strength belonged to me alone.
“Johnbeloved, get me a vulture.”
My dead man walked twenty paces away. He lay down, raised his hands, and arched his back to make his belly look bloated. His fingers curled into claws, and his limbs crooked as if the tendons were contracting. I kept my hands over my mouth to stifle my giggles.
“Oh, no. Oh, for god’s sake,” said the Learned Master Doctress.
Shadows swept over us and circled lower till I heard the rush of wings. Two enormous vultures landed by Johnbeloved. They peeped and chirped and hopped towards him, ready to dig in.
Johnbeloved grabbed one and shook it like he was beating dirt out of a doormat. Its neck snapped. The other bird sprinted away with its wings spread and flapped over our heads in a panic. Johnbeloved held out the dead vulture to me in triumph.
“Hurray!” I shouted. I liked to encourage him when he did something exceptional.
The Learned Master Doctress beat her hands together, which I realized after a moment was her way of cheering. “That was horrible,” she said, laughing. “You should be ashamed of yourself, you cruel little thing.”
I couldn’t bear to have her think so, even though she was mistaken. “Oh no, I’m not! Really. You’d know, if you were from here.”
“How long do I have to live in this — “
“Daddy said to kill as many as I can. They’re carrion-eaters, they’re not sacred. Now, Mommy wants you to give me doctor stuff. Read her letter. If you please,” I added, remembering my manners.
The Doctress broke the seals and a waxed cylinder slid out into her hand. As I’d thought, it was a roll of resin cakes, six at least. She pocketed them without remark, and read the letter in silence, not even moving her lips. That was impressive; normally, “reading” meant “aloud” to me. My eyes were riveted on her hard old mouth, but she let nothing slip. A couple of times, she glanced up at me, with her usual expression of annoyance. I sat on the grass by Johnbeloved’s feet, because there was only one chair and she hadn’t had the manners to ask me in. Fortunately it was so warm and sunny the dew had dried.
“This says she’ll send you fasting,” said the Doctress. “Did she?”
“Yes, she did,” I said, quaking for fear she’d know I was lying.
She creaked to her feet and said, “You’d better come in.”
She’d scrubbed the inside of that barn clean, and packed it with devices. The smell of oil filled the air. There were blacksmith’s tools and a silversmith’s bench and grinding wheels for glass and casting apparatus for making fine tools. I wanted to touch everything, but I kept a grip on Johnbeloved. She had distilling glassware of the sort they show doctors with in plays. But there, they’d fill the vessels with dyed water to look exciting, while these were clean.
“Sit here and bite on this,” said the Doctress, waving me into a padded chair. It faced a mirror. I looked tiny, with my eyes so wide the whites were showing round the irises. She gave me a long cord with a flat tab on the end, which she pushed between my teeth. It was clean, to my relief, and tasted of copper.
With a sizzle like water in a hot pan, the air filled with lights, radiating from my head. The Doctor didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular, but the air around me was packed with clear colors of the rainbow. I could see through them to the mirror, where I beheld my scared little blue face biting on the tab, with a crown of beams of light erupting out of my skull in every direction and color.
I panicked, spat out the tab and wire, and the lights ceased with no harm to me. My skull was whole when I ran my hands over it. Even more reassuringly, Johnbeloved hadn’t reacted. A threat to me would have made him rage, but he was continuing to stare stonily ahead of him at nothing in particular. The Learned Master Doctress snickered at me. I affected not to notice her. I stared myself down in the mirror, my eyes showing too much blue-tinted white around the iris, and I deliberately bit back down on the tab.
The colors erupted in silence. I didn’t see how it happened, but I was the center of a motionless fountain of colors from my skull. It didn’t stir my lank brown hair, so they hadn’t literally burst my head open, but even so I felt them to be parts of me in a way I didn’t have words for. The colors were fresh and clear as if scrubbed clean – I remember a green both bright and deep in a way you could never dye fabric – and there were intermediate shades I didn’t have names for, even from the dye-works. The shapes changed when I moved my head, going from wings to long twists to antlers and antennae. There were glowing tendrils all over my body, too, so that I looked like a sheep of light, ready to be shorn. I stepped back, to the fullest extent of the cord in my mouth, and saw in the mirror that one golden outline stood out around my whole array of colors, giving me the form of a gigantic woman full of light.
It was shocking to see my head so full of richness. Everyone spoke of thoughts and wishes as coming from the heart, in my childhood, but my chest only had little tendrils, while my head erupted in constantly moving shapes. Even as I thought, “Oh! My self lives there!” the very thought shot up a green flame like a dorsal fin for a moment.
Johnbeloved’s reflection remained a huge dark bulk, and the Doctress had no crowns or wings of light, either. As usual, she was a fat old scholar wrapped in worn blue clothes.
She stared my reflection up and down, till she snapped, “Wait wait wait. For Christ’s sake. What is she wasting my time like this for? I told your mother to send you here fasting!”
She knew. Just by looking at me. My heart sank, my mouth opened in a gasp of surprise, the wire fell from my mouth, and the fiery apparations around me vanished. “She did,” I said. “You mustn’t blame Mommy. It was my fault. I was telling the truth that she sent me here empty. I ate raspberries after that.”
“Well, you’ve wasted my time and resolve,” said the Doctress, “so I hope you’re happy. I can’t operate when your self-will is erupting like a volcano.”
“What do you mean, ‘operate’?” I said.
The Doctress seemed wrong-footed. She had told me too much in her anger. “That’s between me and your mother,” she said at last, and went to push past me and sit down.
“Johnbeloved, get me that letter,” I said. In that moment I was sure the Doctress was a quack making things up, and I would expose her to Mommy, and the Doctress would be exiled and I would be praised.
Johnbeloved grabbed the Doctress by the head as she tried to limp outside, and gripped her with one arm. He dug into her pocket and came up with the letter.
I steadied myself on tools and tables as I caught up with Johnbeloved, feeling my stomach rise like I was going to vomit. The letter was crunched in his big fist like a rag and I had to ease it out and smooth it.
“Honey, don’t read it,” said the Doctress.
I opened the sheet of beautiful flourished writing which ended in Mommy’s signature, hatched and squiggled underneath.
It said: To the Learned Master Doctress, greetings, and then the words, My daughter grieves me by leaping on pricks. I will not have her a whore most notorious as well as feeble. Cut her now. Take out her lust and make her chaste, and safe, and a child. Here is half your pay. Unmarked gold, as much as you can carry, will be the other half, buried in the upland at – and then she named the landmarks. I would do it myself if I had the art but it is too much for me. The last six words had been gouged into the paper.
“You faked it,” I said to the Doctress. “You switched it. What did she really write to you?”
She stood there in the grip of my dead man and looked sad.
“Johnbeloved! Get me the real one!”
Johnbeloved dug in the Doctress’s pockets and came up empty-handed.
I advanced, hot with rage, intending to slap her old face. Halfway there, the world turned gray, and I heard myself fall to the floor in a faint, along with the scuffle as Johnbeloved dropped the Doctress and moved too late to catch me.
Some time later, I woke on a low bed with a straw mattress and a pillow that smelled like someone else’s stale hair. There was a window in the wall that the Doctress must have installed – a block of clear glass through which I could see blue sky with fleecy clouds and, as I came to consciousness, a seagull sailing past. My head hurt, but I was wide awake and could no longer bear to lie in bed.
Johnbeloved stood at the foot of my bed looking down at me. I crawled forward and embraced him, then climbed on his back. I was thirsty, not hungry, so it must still be the same day.
The Doctress stood outside, leaning on the horn grip of her stick, staring out to sea. She was looking out at masts and sails. Ships were closing in on the island. White fore-and-aft sails, not my father’s black nighttime rig.
She nodded at me as though we were friends. “Oh, you’re awake. What are these boats doing? They’re not going to land here, surely? They’d crack their keels or bottoms or whatever it is.”
“Raiders,” I said. It was like I’d dropped a bowl and had to grab it before it hit the flagstones. Everything was fast and slow at once. I’d sensed the oncoming raid in my sleep, as usual. I took in every detail of the flagship: the red paint and green copper hull, with dark weedy fouling showing as she rolled her side further out of the water with the swell. The black hats on the crew below us. We were looking so steeply down on them that they seemed like mushrooms with little legs. The many small rings of light that were the nozzles of pumps being aimed up at us. The gigantic figure amidships, in a red veiled hat and one long garment that made it look like a huge red cone with no features. It was directing the crew with slight nods. I thought of it as a giant woman, but no one has ever been sure what that thing is. You likely have your own theory.
“I take it this is what your dad does for a living,” said the Doctress, admiring them.
My mouth caught up with my fear. “Get inside!” I yelled. “NOW! Johnbeloved! Take her inside!”
I had to lock my arms around my dead man and cling hard to his back, because he needed both hands for dragging the Doctress. She squawked like a hen. Just as we reached the threshold, there was a roar from sea-level, and a wave of flames rolled up the cliff from where the first blast struck below us. The splatter didn’t reach us, but the heat hurt my skin at once.
We made it inside, where Johnbeloved tripped on a bench and we fell sprawling on the floor. This time, I managed not to faint. Raiders were awful, but they were familiar.
“All right, I don’t know anything about it,” said the Doctress. “What do we do?”
“Bar all the doors and windows,” I said, struggling with the door. My small weight was just enough to push it closed and swing down the beam across it. “They’ll go away.”
“You know this place is full of the ingredients in incendiaries?” said the Doctress? “I mean, much more flame-throwing and we’ll blow up. We should get out.”
“Not on your life,” I said. “And I know what incendiaries are. If they see us out running around, they’ll send slave-takers up here. But as it is, the fire ship will sail on in a minute. They want to burn the fort or the factory. They just took a swipe at us since you were right there.”
“How about your mommy?”
“She knows I’m with Johnbeloved, she won’t be scared.” My most recent memories rose up and I crushed them down.
“No, I mean…” The Doctress rubbed her eyes. “They’re on their way to kill your mother.”
“She’ll wring out her socks on them,” I said. “We might lose a few stupider girls but they die a lot anyway. Mommy will be fine. You, though… we’re stuck till those ships are gone. Do you have any water?”
“Fifty gallons in the rainwater tanks,” said the Doctress. “It’s basic lab safety. And I have a purifier, and the kettle if that fails us.”
I made her pull a metal shutter over the skylight, and then dip clothes in the water and shove them into the cracks under the doors. The fire rolled across the land like liquid and burned without added fuel for a long time. The patch of grass would be burnt to a crisp, and I hoped our goats had legged it for the middle of the island.
We heard the fire ship sailing along the coast, moving away from us but not fast enough for comfort. The blasts came at irregular intervals, hissing and crackling like the breath of an old woman. At irregular intervals, the walls shook when a new surge hit in the distance. As the fires around us burned themselves out, the air got hot and stale, and the sweat ran down the Doctress’ face. I made her drink a lot of water. Mommy and all the household would be holed up in the fort doing the same while the younger girls waited for their turn at the cannon crew. They must be terrified for me. I longed for Mommy, at the same time as I knew beyond the shadow of self-delusion that she had written that letter.
We sat on the Doctress’s dingy bed, with Johnbeloved standing beside us. The Doctress refilled her horn cup from her pitcher and handed me another cup.
I picked up the pitcher instead and drank straight from its spout.
The Doctress’ thoughts followed mine a moment later. “I’m not going to poison you.”
“You could do anything to me in here,” I said. “You were going to cut my mind off. Johnbeloved, if she tries to use a weapon or a tool of any kind on me, pick her up and dump her off the cliff.”
He met my eyes, which was his way of assenting.
“For the record, I was going to remove your sexual desire, not your whole mind, and your mommy doesn’t think that’s harm. People do it to their dogs every day. If I was you, I’d worry about going home to someone who wants you spayed.”
“She didn’t know what she was asking. I’ll tell her everything.”
“And what’s that supposed to do? She kicks me off this island for doing the thing she said to do, in the letter you’ve seen she wrote?” The Doctress snorted.
“I’ll tell Daddy when he comes home.” But my path was murky and we both knew it.
“Well, you know them best, but you should trust my cynical sense of human nature on this one. Someone who’s been feeding you salivant is not going to be too upset with your mommy over this.”
“Feeding me what?” I said.
There was a horrible pause.
“This is too much!” shouted the Doctress to no one.”I can’t bear it. Salivant! I don’t know what bullshit you call it here. Dog-tongue. Lacsap.” She rolled her eyes like I was being slow at my lessons. “The thing that makes you blue and tiny and shaky.”
No matter how deep a hole you fall into, you can still drop into one that is deeper and worse. “They aren’t giving me anything,” I said. “I got ill when I was six and Mommy tried everything and she’s got a list as long as my arm of things that it wasn’t. You can talk with her about salivant. I’m sure it’s on there.”
“I’ll talk with her again on the day I lose the will to live,” said the Doctress. “Do they give you something to swallow with your food? They might call it tonic, cordial, I don’t know. They’d have to give it to you in food, a cap at a time, to dye you this blue.” Off my blank and stony stare she added, “Oh. Right. Different measures. Half a teaspoon. This much.” She held up a small measure. “I’m eyeballing it based on your body weight. They use it making animals tiny for the circus, where I grew up.”
“They’re not giving me anything, you quack,” I said. “And if you’re not scared of my parents, you’re foolhardy to boot.”
“There are worse people,” said the Doctress. “Exhibit A.” She pointed at the seaward wall, as the roars and splatters of the flames outside reached us faintly. “And I have someone else after me. Your parents are lukewarm by comparison. It sounds like I’d have to be family, God forbid, for them to want to harm me.”
“Who’d you murder?” I said.
It didn’t make her angry. “Arguably, a lot of people. Where I came from, there’s a… ‘king,’ do you have that title here? He gave me a lot of money. Gold.”
“I know what money is.”
“OK. Sorry. I lose track of what translates well. He wanted me to do things. Make him live forever. That didn’t work out, but he liked that I wouldn’t lie to him, so he asked me to focus on how to kill his enemies. I did; I made him tools to kill lots of them.”
“Did he pay you?” I knew the ways of kings from stories.
She inclined her turbaned head towards a small chest at the end of her pallet. Her shoes and stockings were piled up on the lid. “Push those off and have a look inside.”
It was full of tiny cloth bags that weighed like lead. Each one contained four ingots of yellow gold, each shaped like a slipper with a pointed toe. I dug it with my thumbnail and cut a line in the gold.
“Stop scratching my shoe collection,” said the Doctress.
“Does he want you back alive or dead?”
“Alive for questioning.” From her face, I guessed she meant “torture.” “There’s enough here that I can keep running, island to island and world to world, staying ahead of him on one axis or another till he dies or I do. I’m so goddamn tired,” she added under her breath. “All I want is to sit and work on why we, as humans, can’t live longer. I could have done something about that. I could still do something if I had the time and place.”
I tucked that phrase “world to world” into the back of my mind for later. “And did you cut out people’s lusts for him, and their self-will?” She looked away, and that emboldened me to guess. “Every king wants a brave army. You cut out fear.”
“I did a lot of things I regret,” said the Doctress, “and you can wonder forever what they are. Regret won’t put lives back in bodies.”
“If carving people up and hurting them didn’t stop you, what did?” I said. “Why aren’t you still with that outland king, giving him tools of war?”
“What do you care, kid?”
“You’re an object-lesson.”
“I was loyal to him. He wasn’t loyal to me.”
“How about loyalty to my own mother? If Johnbeloved wasn’t here, would you still be… docking my mind like a lamb’s tail?”
“Well, not now. It was all right, before. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. But now you see the ramifications, my conscience won’t let me. I swore not to harm anyone, when they made me a doctor of medicine.”
It finally sank in that the letter had to be real. The use of “grieves me” was Mommy, through and through. I’d accepted that, and I was starting to believe the other accusation. It was silly to threaten the Doctress, when inside my heart I was the one tumbling off a cliff, about to hit the rocks.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What good does it do her to have me spayed? She and Daddy embrace each other, and the ewes and rams, and our women with Daddy’s men every chance they get. Everybody in the world is leaping, but she wants to stop me. And it’s not because of babies – everyone knows how to keep from having a baby. It’s just for spite. Why?”
The Learned Master Doctress shuddered. “Not a lot I can say that she didn’t.” She heaved herself up on her cane. “Might as well eat.”
She put six hard biscuits on a plate and started eating them, and after a moment, I bit into one too. It was tough and flavorless as a wood chip, but it felt good in my stomach after I got it down. I made my jaw tired chewing two more.
Mommy’s words ran in my mind: she will stay chaste, and safe, and my child.
I’ve striven to be a kind mother to you, but one of these days I will do something to you that is not fair. Then you will know rage. I knew it then.
I would have stayed chaste if she’d told me to. I would never have laid a hand on Niall again. I only wanted her to think well of me, and she had all the power of that. But she hadn’t drawn on that power. She had sent me off to be spayed because it was easier than telling me what to do to be loved. I had been loyal to her, and she hadn’t been loyal to me.
Speaking of the ships, we took a quick look outside just before sunset and they were gone. The clifftops around us were blackened and smoking. Little fires still blazed, including around a dead sheep that I hadn’t noticed earlier. Two dark figures with funny-shaped hats peered at us from the distance, silhouetted against the yellow afternoon sky. The raiders had landed sailors wrapped in fire gear, who were now waiting for the smoke and fires to die out before capturing or killing us.
I made Johnbeloved lurch out of the doorway and take a few steps towards them. They only needed a second to realize he wasn’t a living man, and then they were sprinting off over the nearest headland, presumably there to rejoin their ship, if our archers didn’t pick them off from the bell tower. Faintly, in the distance, I heard the alarm bell at the fort ringing over the curve of the hill. Everyone would be inside; they were just doing it to jeer at the raiders.
It was all a welcome diversion from the crisis. I knew too much about Mommy, and I could never un-read her words about me. In that moment I even resented that she’d ever taught me to read.
My rage and sorrow grew stronger because I felt stronger. I’d walked to the door, after Johnbeloved, without leaning on anything. When I noticed that, as an experiment, I walked all the way around the Doctress’ cluttered work space. No fainting or queasiness. The inside of my mouth didn’t even feel sore after eating the hard biscuits. I was uneasy at how well I felt.
“You’re perking up,” said the Doctress. As I passed her, she caught my wrist and felt my pulse. “That’s more like it. Sit down a minute, won’t you? I want to test your reflexes and then we can give you more un-drugged food and check them again.”
It was as simple as that to accept the truth and start thinking ahead. I wandered through the building turning my idea over in my mind, shaking my head when the Doctress spoke to me. It was as though I was fully awake for the first time in my life. I didn’t much like that feeling, but I liked my idea.
At last I told the Doctress, “I have a task for you. Then you can measure my reflexes all day. I want you to — “
“I said I’m not doing it!” she cut me off. “Don’t give me some weird martyrdom, because you won’t get it here.”
“I don’t want you to cut out my lusts. I want you to cut out my loyalty.”
“It’d violate your free will,” she said. She did not say “That’s impossible!”
“My free will is right here.” I thumped my flat little chest, then my head too for good measure.
“You can’t know that — ” she protested.
I charged over her words: “I choose never to be loyal to anyone but myself. Nobody wants the best for me, except me. You, for certain, can’t be trusted. And this — ” I waved the letter in her face. “I would have worked all my life to please her, and she doesn’t want that, she wants me cropped.” I felt pleased with my logic and also felt I should be locked up forever for even thinking of this. We had to complete the process before I changed my mind. “Rid me of this leash that everyone uses to drag each other around by. If I ever need it, I can feign it.” I was loving the sound of my own voice so much that I’d slid into Mommy’s mannered wording. “Can you do it without cutting out anything else?”
She nodded. “We have to wait eight hours to make sure you don’t do it on a full stomach.”
“You mean that’s really a danger? Everyone’s been lying so much that I thought you might be saying it to be cruel.”
“No, I’m saying it so you don’t puke while I’m working. I can do it at dawn when you’ve digested those biscuits further.”
“Good. How long will it take me to recover?”
“Same as with any other incursion, you just need extra sleep. I could send you home tomorrow night.”
“Good. Do that.” I was amazed she hadn’t fought me harder.
She said in a brusque voice, “Two things. No, three. One, you have to do everything I say till it’s over and you’ve slept it off. Two. After that, go home and pretend like I cut out your lusts, till they catch on. I guess even troglodytes can make this place too hot to hold me.” (I didn’t know the term at the time and thought it meant a cookstove.) “And the third thing is, don’t eat or drink except from common dishes ever again. If you let her hand-feed you she’ll be back at her tricks and next time she might kill you.”
“I promise.”
“That’s not worth the paper it’s printed on,” said the Doctress tartly. “You just asked me to cut out the loyalty that might make you inclined to keep those promises. Give me something stronger.”
It was a fair point. I swore by the god my people swear by, and she made no more protestations. “Can I have my pockets full of your biscuits to take home?” I added. “They’re so good.”
“Yes, yes, anything, only be quiet now and let me prep.”
She did it at dawn, and I am not going to describe it. Johnbeloved glared at us, under my orders not to intervene, and the Learned Master Doctress took certain actions, and I was brave.
The bad part was afterwards, when I lay in nightmares on the bed. I had no physical wounds, but I kept thinking there was a half-healed scar on my head that itched like mad. I tried to scratch it, until the Doctress had to wrap my hands in cloth and cover me with blankets. I poured with sweat and had nightmares I was melting.
It took me longer to regain my senses than she’d predicted. I slept the rest of the day and the night. The following morning was clear, and I felt marvelous, the ruler of my own body. My clothes were saturated with sweat and I had no clean linen to change into, but my heart and head were light, with no itching in my soul or body. The Doctress gave me two more biscuits and a cup of water for breakfast. They were heavenly.
I could just make out the charred remains of the goat-cart outside. The grass around the barn was black and crunchy under our feet, and smelled like a bonfire. We walked a little way along the cliff-top, calling “Come up, come up!” to my mother’s goats, the Doctress shaking corn feed in a tin cup. There was no sign of them. I assumed they were cinders. Johnbeloved lurched after us.
“Mommy will be glad to get me back alive,” I said. “She won’t bother coming after you. Go to the landmark, dig up the gold she promised you, and never tell anyone what you did.”
“I don’t need more gold,” said the Doctress wearily. “I can only carry so much shit when I leave. Just buy me as much time as you can.”
That simplified things. I had been wondering how to get rid of her.
The Doctress’ thoughts had run a different direction: “Did you notice you’ve walked a quarter of a mile without leaning on your dead man, and you’re not out of breath?” She took my pulse.
“Good breakfast you gave me,” I said, trying to make it funny.
She wouldn’t smile. “How do you think that’s going to go over at home? Better you than me, kid. But if you can keep her from catching on for a couple of days, I’ll have time to pack.”
I was relieved at the thought. “Johnbeloved, take me home,” I said, and climbed onto him without looking back. He lumbered off across the highlands, carrying me as lightly as I now carried the Doctress’ biscuits.
We got halfway home and ran into a scouting party out looking for me. They started cheering as soon as they saw me and Johnbeloved towering against the sky, and I waved and cheered right back. I was kissed and embraced by the old women, who carried me the rest of the way home, with Johnbeloved pacing after them.
The courtyard was full of sheep saved from the raiders, and Sukey and Tawdry were packed in there too, happily bullying the ewes. They’d run home at the first onslaught. The fort and the factory were unharmed, and the only signs of the raid were the burned wadding from our fort cannon lying about all over the place, and the blackened grass at the edge of the cliff. Everyone had a glitter of victory in their eyes and even the old scarred women with hardly any hair or lung capacity left looked pleased with themselves. They were baking potatoes wrapped in seaweed.
Mommy came out, swept me up in her arms, and covered me in kisses. Kissing her back was the first lie I told her, and I made a resounding success of it. I smiled and embraced her – but not too firmly, that might give my thoughts away – and I used the faintest squeak of a voice as I told her that there had been raiders and the Doctress had sheltered me overnight.
“But how are you feeling?” said Mommy, seating me on her own bed and shooing her women away. “She can’t have been feeding you. Here, little one, eat up, drink up.”
She gave me corn cakes soaked in honey, and wine cut with hot water. It smelled so good I could have wept. I was hungry, after years of having to be coaxed to eat. For a second I almost pretended it was three days earlier and I was my old self.
“I’m not hungry now, Mommy, you have it,” I said, pushing the dish and cup back.
She laughed in disbelief. “What? No, you need this. Here.” She wrapped my hand around the cup and tried to raise it to my lips.
I shoved back, and the wine spilled everywhere. “I said no!”
My mother’s delicate jaw hung slack for a moment. All the warmth and smiling pleasure drained out of her as I watched. “What did that woman do to you?” she whispered.
That was rich. I burst out laughing. “Not what you asked,” I said. “You sent me with the strangest letter, and I decided you couldn’t have meant it. Though you should still send her the money as you promised.”
“Give me the letter,” said Mommy. She threw the dish against the wall so that it splattered everywhere, and went rooting through my pockets with both hands.
“She’s still got it,” I lied. In fact, I had folded it small and put it in Johnbeloved’s tunic. “I told her that if you don’t send the money, she can ask Daddy for it when he comes home.”
Mommy looked at me as if I’d shat on her bed. “I never…” She was lost for words, for once. “I never expected that… I never…” She couldn’t finish the sentence without saying something against herself. For a second I thought she was going to fling me after the dish. It was the only time I saw Mommy lose her self-control.
I smiled at her. The part of me that would have grieved had been cut out by the Doctress, and I’ve never missed it.
“I’m going to start eating from common dishes among the women,” I said. “It’s fitting for a queen of all the islands.” And I walked out, elated, not at all dizzy. I kept touching my nose for blood, but none came.
Daddy got home with Whistlepig a month after that, exhausted and scurvied and missing a quarter of our men after several other nations’ ships had chased him all around their shores. The outside world was getting hostile to his kind of work.
By that time, I was an inch taller, the blue slate color was fading from my skin, and my gowns had all had to be let out in the arms and down at the hems. I’d only eaten with my clean hands, from common platters on the same crusts as everyone else, and drunk straight from the pump or the rain barrels. If I needed a change of pace, I ate a biscuit from the stash I kept in a tin box outside the fort. That was all it took. The shakiness and fainting were gone, and I could walk up the tower without tiring myself. Mommy would not be alone with me or speak to me directly.
I lost Johnbeloved during that month through my own stupidity, when I got up one night and rode him down to the boat launch. There was no moon, but the stars were brilliant and there were luminous jellyfish in the gentle swell.
“You’re good to me,” I said. “I consider that you should have free will. I’m going to be a queen one day, and I’ll have followers who want to serve me. Hold still and tip your head back.”
Johnbeloved, patient as a horse, let me slide my sewing scissors between his lips and cut the stitches. I managed not to injure his papery gray skin.
“If you can speak, tell me your real name.”
He trembled. No sound came out.
“Will you serve me of your own free will?”
Johnbeloved opened his mouth and sand and spices poured out. It smelled stuffy, like old pomanders. He set me down on shore, with all gentleness, just above the high-water mark. Then he turned and walked into the sea. I yelled for him to come back, but to no avail. He strode away till the water closed over his head. I would have gone on weeping and screaming, but they would have heard me in the fort. Instead, I went back to bed and acted astonished in the morning when Johnbeloved was gone. Mommy couldn’t enquire further, because that would have involved speaking to me.
I have only myself to blame, but I miss that dead man every day.
A few days after Daddy came home, some of the men were exclaiming angrily at breakfast that the Learned Master Doctress had left without paying my father the rent. I don’t mean that they murdered her; she had had a good month to escape by the time Mommy worked out how to tell Daddy to kill her without admitting what she, Mommy, had done. Months later still, I was strong enough to walk across the island on my own legs, and I found the stone barn as clean and empty as if she’d never been there.
Of course, I did become a queen, and not only of Dead Horse Island. But whoever I made love to, it wasn’t Niall, and I don’t wish to destroy you with embarrassment, so I will end here.
END