The old woman who now came mumbling along with her list was a reminder.
“Haifazh? Are you clean now?”
“No, Mahmi. I am still unclean.”
The old woman made a check mark. “Bulerah? Are you Bulerah?”
“I am,” the woman said.
“You will return to your owner when your child is weaned and sold. Is your child weaned.”
“She is only a week old, Mahmi,” said Bulerah.
“Ah,” said the old woman, stumping along, making another check mark.
“Your uncleanness has lasted a long time,” said Bulerah wonderingly. “Your child looks to be half a year old.”
So far as Haifazh was concerned, the uncleanness she had originally counterfeited by smearing herself with filth would last forever. The old women never bothered to check. They just asked and believed what they were told. “True,” she said calmly. “It is probably not uncleanness at all but a disease. An infection from when they cut and sewed me again when my baby was born. I will probably die of it.”
She intended to continue unclean until she died, that was certain. Where this spirit of rebellion had come from, she could not tell. It had arisen out of nothing, out of pain and fear and a fire burning inside her that required vengeance to be quenched. So, she would continue unclean. The House of Restitution was peaceful, at least. She could stay here so long as she could work the loom. It was preferable to the bower of her owner—fat, sweaty, heaving gaver of a man. He had liked to bite her breasts until they bled. It had pleased him to make bruises.
“I can’t wait to go back,” sighed Bulerah. “I don’t like this place.”
“Weren’t you raised in the tower?” Haifazh asked, curious. “I was.”
“I was raised in the bower of my progenitor,” the other said proudly. “My mother was his favorite and I was twin of his oldest son.”
Haifazh’s lip curled. “Don’t crow, woman. No matter where you were raised, you were cut and sewn when you were a child; then when you were twelve or so, your progenitor sold you to your owner who sooner or later sent you here.” She gestured at the room around them. “When you had your child, the midwives cut you again and sewed you up so you could hardly pee. You were lucky not to become infected and die as a fifth of us do when they cut us. One out of every five daughters, lost. One out of every five mothers, lost. You are maybe lucky to be alive, but maybe not, for when your blood time comes, the blood will clot inside you, and cleaning yourself will be agony. Then, when you go back to him, he’ll hurt you even more, expecting you to be silent while he does it. And when you’re old, Bulerah, they’ll put you out in the Court of Removal to die. Bower or tower, where you were reared makes no difference in the end!”
The other flushed and turned her eyes toward her child.
“Nothing makes any difference to women,” muttered Haifazh. “If there were no women, that might make a difference.” She stood up, still cuddling Shira, and looked through the tall window, across the Court of Removal and the high wall, across a corner of the fye fields to the River Fohm. What she saw there made her exclaim in surprise, bringing all the other women to their feet.
The ship tied at the dock and the flier beside it on the bank had been there earlier, rare enough to warrant watching though not truly astonishing. What had not been there before were the women, women standing about with their faces uncovered and behind them something shifty and wonderful-looking, with scales and horns, or perhaps plates and fangs, but at any rate a mysterious and unusual sharpness, protectiveness, hugeness kind of thing that none of them could see clearly. Heedless of the commands of their keepers and the halfhearted blows of the canes on their basket helmets, the weavers thronged the windows, leaning out to see better.
“That’s a flier,” said Haifazh. “I saw one once before.”
“What is a flier?” asked Bulerah. She had never seen a flier, a ship, a river until she came here. There had been nothing at all to see from her owner’s bower except the tops of the trees and the sky. Nothing to see but the sky, nothing to do but bathe or sleep or tell stories or sing, very softly, or come to her owner’s bed when he sent for her. Haifazh’s words had reminded her how much it had hurt when she was new-bought. Now she’d been cut and sewn again, there would be pain again. She hadn’t thought of that until now. The thought almost drove away the pleasure of seeing new things.
Below them, on the riverbank, the passengers of the Dove became aware they were being watched.
“All those windows over there are full of women,” said Cafferty. “If I couldn’t see them, I could smell them from here. They’re frantic with curiosity.”
“Never mind about them,” growled Zasper, who had seen starlight on the sails of the Dove in the early hours and had been awaiting her arrival since he had landed, to the consternation of the guards who were even now hovering at a safe distance, growling among themselves. “You tell me Fringe is missing; so what, if anything, have you done about her?” He glared over Jory’s shoulder at Danivon, who stood broodingly at the rail of the ship.
“Don’t snarl, Zasper,” Danivon said in an empty voice. “They were already beyond our reach when we noticed they were gone. We saw where they went, at least we took sightings of the last place we saw them. I wanted to
