The Book of a Thousand Days (8 page)

I tried to imagine. Even how he slaps hands and flicks burning chips into our tower, even though his voice makes my stomach spin, would I marry him to escape this coffin? After falling in love with her khan, would the thought of being with any other man make me weep and tangle my hair? Would I have chosen to lock myself up for seven years and even die from darkness? I tried to imagine, but it made me dizzy, and I couldn't keep my eyes on the stitching.

Stop

. Just thinking of a commoner marrying gentry is a gross sin of the kind that could get me noosed on the city's south wall and never welcomed into the eternal Realm of the Ancestors. She's wrong to make me think it.

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My only reply was, "You do what you thinks best, my lady. If you'd rather wed Lord Khasar than be in this tower another day, I'll stay with you all the same."

I didn't want to say that, but I did, and I meant it. I'm her lady's maid, I swore an oath, and I'll serve her till I die.

She smiled, and I saw her cheeks dimple for the first time since we met. What a sad little bird she usually is, how she droops and moans when she could be as brilliant as the sun. Sometimes I forget that she's gentry, that her blood is divine. But when she smiled, I remembered--she is as beautiful as light on water.

She looked back at the fire. "I know I should have married Lord Khasar. I was born to marry. That's my only purpose."

"That can't be, my lady."

"My father told me so when I was small enough to sit on his knee. My older sister, Altan, she'll be the lady of the realm after my father. I have an older brother, Erdene, who will rule if Altan were to die. I'm the third child. I used to dream I'd be chief of animals one day. I like animals. But my father said I'm too dull-witted. And besides, I'm gentry--any commoner can be raised up to be a chief. But the third child of a ruling lord is only fit for marrying off to other gentry."

I could tell by the way my lady stared at the fire that

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she was done talking, so I sat by her, quiet, and thought about what she'd said. Her sister's name, Altan, means

golden

in the naming language. Gold is the color of the gentry, and it seems a right name for the lady of a realm. Erdene means

jewel

, another noble name. Saren means

moonlight

. I wonder what her mother thought when she named her moonlight, the dim light that keeps the night sky company until the blue sky can return.

It's strange for me to think about gentry in that way, as people who had mothers who gave them names. People who wanted things they couldn't have, who were ordered to marry men they feared. Though I clean her plate and wash her unders, I guess until today, I never truly thought of my lady as a real person.

[Image: Drawing of Smiling Woman]

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Later

I showed my lady the drawing I did of her smiling, and she said that I'm her best friend. I thought I should write that down.

Day 298

Daily I sing to my lady. Sometimes it's to help ease a headache or bellyache, and sometimes it's my continued attempt to cure whatever troubles her inside. Yesterday I tried a new song, one I'd nearly forgotten.

The song for unknown ailments is a wail. High the notes stretch, my throat stretching with them, the tune reaching up and up like a wounded bird's call, "Rain rips as it falls, it tears as it falls!" Just the sound of it echoing in our tower made my chest feel tight. My lady sighed and curled up against me, not crying but breathing as if she would. After she had a good rest, she seemed lighter. She even chatted with me over supper and joined me in a game of pea toss.

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So I went to bed content last night, thinking I'd made some progress with her healing. But this morning she's the same again. If only she'd tell me why she's so sad and crooked-brained and lonely and often acts as if she's only half her age. Does she even know why? Maybe it's just how she is, maybe there's nothing in her to fix.

I'll keep trying.

Day 312

It's summer, and thank Evela, goddess of sunlight, that it's a gentle one this year or we'd roast in our brick oven. There were children running around our tower this morning. I think they've been here before, but I could hear them more clearly today. They were closer to the tower, perhaps daring one another to draw near, and their voices ghosted up the uncovered hole. As they ran around and around, I could hear broken bits of the song they sang. I believe it went like this:

Two dead Ladies in a tower

Counting peas for every hour

In seven years

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With all their tears

They drown in pea soup sour

I didn't care for their song much, but I sat near the hole all the same and listened, listened, listened. New sounds are like lost sugar.

Day 339

Most of the time, my lady sits alone and stares at things--her fingers, the floor, a single hair. I wonder how a person can sit so much without work in her hands. Are muckers born to work and gentry born to sit? This darkness makes me ask questions that never occurred to me under the Eternal Blue Sky.

But it doesn't seem fair, does it? Why can't my lady dip her hands into the wash water and give the clothes a good scrubbing or mend a rip or make a pot of something worth eating? I'd be pleased as anything if I never had to haul a bucket of water up the cellar ladder again, but some work isn't so bad, not when you have naught else to do but stare at a candle flame or into the shivering dark.

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Later

Ancestors forgive me, but I offered to teach my lady how to cook dung cakes.

She said, "I don't know how, Dashti."

"That's why I'll teach you."

"I'll do it wrong."

"Of course you will, everyone does wrong when learning something new."

Then she started to cry. "But I'll do it

wrong

."

I wish I understood my lady and her crying and her shaking. She looks at the whole world as though it crouches over, ready to pounce.

Day 457

Weeks and weeks go by, months and months. I wash, I cook. My lady is more shadow than girl. Once I tried to teach her to read. Her eyes wandered.

Some days I hate candlelight. Sometimes I think we'd be better in all darkness, then we'd just hold still until everything went away. But I keep cooking.

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I keep washing. I keep singing. And I keep the fire and candles lit.

Day 528

Today I thought I would like to die, so I went into the cellar and smacked a few rats with the broom. It helped some.

Day 640

This summer is worse than last. The heat, heat, heat pushes against the walls of the tower, forces its way inside, and yells silently in our faces. We sit in the cellar, underground where it's a little cooler, and keep the rats company. Or we sit upstairs, where the barest slip of breeze comes through the crack between bricks. I can't light fires, lest we die of the heat. We eat cold food. We pour water over our heads and shiver.

The hearth is left bare for summer, and I feel as though we're living with eyes shut. Day and night we keep a candle burning, and that tiny fingertip of light wobbles before me, as if too weak to live on, gasping its last breath. It creates more shadows than light,

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filling the tower with corners. When my lady sits against a far wall, she disappears.

I don't dare light more than one candle. The rats have eaten many. A dying wasp of candlelight is so much better than none.

Some days I look at the bricks in the door and wonder how hard I'd have to hit them to knock one loose. If I managed to break us out, would the guards shoot me with their arrows? Are they even there anymore? Would her honored father know of our escape and stuff us back in for another seven years? Would Lord Khasar hunt us down?

This is more thinking than I've done in months, and I'm tired now. The heat is so huge, I have no space left for thoughts.

Day 684

Here's something true about darkness--after enough time, you begin to see things that aren't there. Faces look at me, and when I turn my head, they disappear. Colors wash themselves before my eyes, then fade away. Shiny gray dream rats dart between my feet but don't make a sound. I wanted to write this down so I can remember that those things aren't real.

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My lady sees more than I do. Sometimes what she sees makes her cry.

Day 723

I think my... I think I...

What was I going to write? I can't think of words. The candle flame is glaring at me. My lady moans. I'm going to go to bed now.

Day 780

It's winter again. Over two years behind bricks. For weeks and weeks, my brain felt slow as ice pouring, but the past days, thoughts and questions and memories have started to roil in my head again. Is it a sign that something's going to happen soon? The longer I'm in the dark, the more memories are brighter in my eyes than the bricks in the wall. I begin to feel surrounded by ghosts, people long gone pressing around me.

My father died before I was old enough to call him Papa. It should've been all right for us because

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Mama had three sons before me. The oldest was fourteen, of an age to hunt for food and protect us, as sons are supposed to do. And he did, for five years. But then we had a standing-death winter, when the night gets cold sudden fast, the air freezes like ice, and in the morning you find the horses and yaks and sheep dead on their feet.

Our family hadn't belonged to a clan for years, so we were on our own.

Three days after the animals died, my mama and I woke to discover my brothers gone. Their boots gone. Their bedrolls and knives and belts. Gone. I understand why they left us. With a mother and a young girl, they'd have little chance to earn enough to trade for new animals. Alone, they could pledge themselves to another clan, work for seven years, then find a bride in that clan and build up their own herd. But with father and animals dead, our family was a grave.

Mama and I were hungry lots after that, but we had our gher and one animal left, a mare named Weedflower who still gave milk.

We didn't dare go to the main pasturing places. Any mucker out of luck would see a woman and a girl with no men to protect them as an invitation to plunder. And besides, with only one animal, we

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couldn't live the life of a herder. So we camped near forests where we could hunt for small animals and gather what the trees would give us. We hunched up in the coldest places, the driest, the least inviting, where no one else wanted to be. And times when we had to go near the city to do piecework to trade for cloth or tools, we smeared Weedflower's dung in our hair and wore our rags, so no man would be tempted to carry one of us off.

We survived. And with Mama's singing, we stayed healthy enough. We may've eaten mudfish more than rabbit and stick birds more than antelope, we may've watered the milk gray and slept with our mare inside the gher for warmth, but times there were when we laughed enough to shake the forest and ripple the rivers. Times I thought, good riddance to my brothers. They don't know what they missed.

Here's a memory of my mama and home that my fingers long to draw:

[Image: Picture of Woman Cooking and a Hut in the Background]

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And then I get to remembering when she died. I was fourteen. I'd been crying too much and was weak as wet laundry. But I laid her out on the open steppes under the Eternal Blue Sky, with her feet pointed at the Sacred Mountain so her soul would know which way to walk. I sat with her another day and night. I told her stories about our life together so her soul could remember who she was, then I sang her the parting songs. The songs that tell her spirit that she's ready to go, that it's all right, that she can leave me now and walk up the Sacred Mountain and back down again into the Ancestors' Realm. In cities, singing the soul out of the body is a shaman's work, but we muckers had to learn those songs ourselves, with no shaman around for miles.