They carried me on a donkey-cart out of the August City first thing in the morning. They let me lay at my feet the pack Mother and Father had filled for me. Sefi's basket was tied on top of it. They did not bind my hands. They didn't expect me to fight them. I was only a small dark girl.
I wanted to fight them, but I didn't know how. I sat with my hands clenched in my lap as the cart rocked under me, taking me away from the only home I'd ever known. I'd looked back once as we left. Never again. The sight of the city walls receding made me sick.
Sap-green splashed across the flat landscape, fields of waist-high soya plants that stretched out to the white wall far in the distance. Elp, their gray trunks swinging like nimble hands, worked the fields alongside the farmers. Mounds of vining gourds lined the cement roadway. The color of those fat orbs made me think of the glowing cone of oracle ore. But everything did, now. I'd dreamt of it last night and woken with my lungs aching for it.
The six escorts, sitting in their dark mourning clothes, didn't try to speak to me. I yearned to tear their black tunics. If they truly mourned my loss, they wouldn't treat me like a dumb animal.
I cleared my throat and said, "You have no right to make me leave."
Half of them flinched, I assumed at the sound of my voice. I wondered, not for the first time, what it sounded like. What anything sounded like.
Their leader didn't flinch, but he turned towards me. He did me the honor of meeting my eyes. When he spoke, it was slowly, each motion of his mouth exaggerated. It made it harder to read. "The visions of Holy Efra give us every right, imperfecta. You were raised a citizen of the Plenary Cities. You should know well our need."
I slowed my voice down, too, and reveled in his wince. "Our need? Death-palsy's gone."
"Gone because of her wisdom. Would you see it return by staying among us?"
I narrowed my eyes. "If Holy Efra was so sacred, if her visions were so true, then why did she die? Shouldn't she have seen it coming?"
His lip curled. "Blasphemy. I see why the Great Unknowns have cursed your body." Then he turned back around, and he would not speak to me again.
#
Beyond the wall around the farms, the land was barren. Wasted. The hard cracked earth yielded nothing but brown leafless bushes, dead grass and poison-milk spurges with spines lining their fat green ribs. Overhead, white vultures drifted like kites, their shadows sweeping the rutted dirt road. As I watched, the wind picked up dust and bits of dead grass and spun it into the sky. A cool breeze dried the sweat on the back of my neck, and I shivered. It must be cold at night.
The cart rolled through the great iron gates and into the desert. I was half-afraid they would stop there and leave me and Sefi to the mercy of the vultures, but the asses trotted on.
If the escorts tried to tell me anything about where we were going, I did not see it. I thought instead about what Mother had told me as we wept together the night before.
"You will need to join a troupe," Mother had signed to me while we sat under the blue satin canopy of my bed. Father had been elsewhere, packing things for me and searching the attic for traveling supplies and maps. Sefi, released from her large window cage and seated on my pillow, had snaked her head around to preen herself.
I had wiped the tears from my face and signed back, "A what?"
"A troupe," Mother signed. "A company of imperfectas. It is not safe to be alone out in the desert. They gather near the Plenary Cities and travel between them, seeking out what money the perfectas are willing to throw them."
"You never mentioned them before."
"No. Your father and I had no reason to." She wouldn't meet my eyes.
"You should have taken me out to see them, if you thought I'd join them someday."
"We didn't want to draw notice to you before your presentation to the Justry." Mother swept an impatient hand through the air. "That doesn't matter now. You must find a group."
"Are any of them artists?" Painted panels crowded my room, propped against every surface. Images of birds fluttered across them, wingtips brushing portraits and landscapes and everything else I could see from my window.
I had decorated the walls of my room, too, but that had been years ago, before I'd figured out the right ratio of egg yolk and water to pigment. The paint had cracked and flaked to the point of being unrecognizable. I had always intended to scrape it off and start over. I supposed now I never would.
Mother hesitated. "There's little call for art outside of the cities, dear one."
"I already packed my pigments and brushes."
"Few can afford it. And I doubt you'll have access to eggs."
"Yes, I will. I'm taking Sefi with me." I pulled the goose onto my lap, where she nibbled at my arms as I stroked her rusty-brown sides. Her neck and head were white, except for the tuft of black feathers that crested her skull.
Mother shook her head. "Of course. Now listen. Do not join one of the spectacles, for they will only use you. Avoid also the pilgrims, who starve and think it the Unknowns' will. Find a group that can support you."
I dislodged Sefi and signed, "I don't want to. I want to stay here."
"You can't."
"If you hid me–"
Her sharp gesture cut me off. "Do you think no one has tried?"
I rose to my knees on the bed. "I don't know, do I? You never wanted to discuss any of this. You only ever told me there was a test, and what I had to do to pass."
Her eyes shimmered with tears. "How could we focus on what would happen if you failed?"
"You should have–"
"We did not want to remember."
The look on her face struck me to the heart. I sank down beside her. Signed, "Remember?"
Her hair fell to cover her face. Her hands moved like they ached. "We never spoke to you of your grandparents."
"They're dead. Aren't they? You and Father met at the orphanage." That was one tale I'd watched over and over throughout my childhood. A favorite story, two orphans falling in love and making good in the wake of the great disease.
"No, dear one. Not all of them." She folded her hands in her lap for a long moment, then went on. "Your father and I were born of deaf parents. In those days, before Holy Efra and the pandemic, the deaf lived in the Plenary Cities and were tolerated. All imperfectas did."
"Really?"
"Really. Where do you think we learned to speak like this, dear one? Without them, your father and I would have had no signs to pass on to you."
I stared at her slender hands as though they held marvels. "What happened to them?"
Her hands stilled for a long moment. "Death-palsy came. You know the histories."
"Yes, but it killed them all, didn't it? My grandparents?"
She shook her head. "Your father's parents. My father. But your grandmother, my mother Hashida, lives. She sent me a letter two years ago. She works with automas. Near Holy Efra's Mines."
The jolt of the donkey-cart going over a rut brought me back to the present. Holy Efra's Mines. The word, an elaborate hand-sign, hung in my mind like an oath. I reached down to pet Sefi through the mesh of her basket. I didn't want to be a miner, or a mechanic. But Mother wanted me to seek out Grandmother. For protection. For guidance. For family. Grandmother's letter now lay pressed between two pages of my favorite art book, at the bottom of my pack.
And Father had gifted me with one of his father's trinkets. Tears had trickled down his cheeks when he slipped the brass-edged slate amulet over my head. Holy signs decorated it, along with the word "DEAF" and an ear, crossed out. The back side was blank, for the owner to write messages. A tiny brass box filled with white chalks hung from it and rested hard and cold between my breasts. I'd hidden it under my camise. I couldn't bring myself to look at it. But to take it off would be to discard Father's last touch.
#
The donkey-cart reached its destination halfway through mid-morning. This land was no oasis like those they spoke of in fairy-stories. But a handful of real trees fanned long limbs over the desert. Trees could not grow without water.
We neared the grove. The trees were spindly and thin, barely screening out any sun at all. Tents circled a well at the center, made of patched fabrics in a riot of shapes. They sprawled every which way. One huge red tent at the edge of camp stood like a funny mushroom that had sprouted in a land without moisture. The donkey-cart stopped nearby.
The leader of the escorts walked round the cart to help me down. I let him. It was a long way to the ground.
He handed me my bag and Sefi's basket once I had found my feet and told me, mouthing with exaggerated slowness, "I pray your pilgrimage will cleanse you, sister, of your blindness to the great revelations, and that the Great Unknown will see fit to heal you."
I shrugged my pack on. Inside her basket, Sefi fluttered, nearly overbalancing me. She was heavy. I signed, "And I pray the stick will fall out of your ass, brother."
The hand signals meant nothing to him. His smile was blank. "If that day comes, you may of course return to the city with proof of your healing."
I signed back, "If you can't get it through your thick skull that I'm not a plague-bearer, then I doubt even the Great Unknowns could open your eyes." It was true blasphemy this time. But it felt good.
He bobbed a friendly bow to me, still ignorant, and climbed into the cart. The escorts turned the cart and bolted back towards the August City as if they feared I would infect them.
Well. Perhaps they did.
Comments