Flower Gatherer watched them go with a defiant curl of his lower lip. The three of us left outside stood in the courtyard, avoiding one another’s glances. None of us dared to speak until, for want of anything better to say, I posed a question that had been on the tip of my tongue since the morning: ‘Does either of you know what it is between Handy and Red Macaw?’
‘Not my quarrel,’ the man muttered. ‘You’ll have to ask him in there.’
Goose said: ‘Why do you ask, Yaotl?’
‘I just want to know why I’m a better candidate to help with the burial than he is, that’s all. And he seemed to think he could help – in fact he almost insisted.’
Goose said: ‘Don’t take it personally, but as far as Handy is concerned a half-wit with only one leg would be a better candidate than Red Macaw!’
I could not resist trying to probe further. ‘He’s injured, isn’t he? What was it, an old war wound? Was that anything to do with it? Were they in the army together and…’
‘Yaotl,’ Goose interrupted me, ‘Look, I’m sure you mean well, but this isn’t going to do any good. And now really isn’t the time.’
‘But…’
‘Besides, it’s too late,’ she added firmly. ‘I think they’re ready to start now.’ As Handy came out of the house, with a stone-headed hammer dangling from his fingers, I realised I could hear female voices from the far side of the courtyard wall at the back, and that the ritual was about to begin.
Handy wielded the hammer himself. He grunted as he swung its head against the wall of his courtyard, his face twisting with effort and something that may have been rage. I wondered where his fury was directed: at the gods whose callous whim had snatched his wife and child away from him, turning what should have been a joyous day into an occasion for mourning; at Red Macaw for an offence no-one was prepared to name; or just at anything that might distract him for a moment from his grief?
The hammer smashed into the frail adobe wall, each stroke landing with an echoing thud and raising a cloud of white dust. It took just four or five blows to make a hole big enough for a man to step through; or to carry a corpse through. The dead woman must not leave the house through the doorway, lest her spirit – the Divine Princess she was to become – return that way to torment her living relatives.
As the last fragments of plaster clattered to the floor, the voices from beyond the wall grew louder. Shrill screams, yells, howling: they were war cries, but the voices uttering them were not men’s. Gentle Heart, the midwife, would have gathered her own army, mostly older women from the Pleasure House, fellow midwives and curers. These were the comrades in arms of the dead woman, come to escort her to her last resting-place on Earth.
A face appeared in the hole: a young woman’s, one I did not recognise. As those behind her maintained their terrifying cries, she clambered over the rubble into the courtyard and surveyed the scene around her as if inspecting it.
‘The sun has descended to the Land of the Dead,’ she told Handy. Her voice was soft in contrast with the noise from the other side of the broken wall and hard to hear above it. ‘The little woman’s comrades, the Divine Princesses, are ready to receive her.’
‘Who are you?’ Handy replied shortly. ‘Where’s Gentle Heart?’
The woman’s face darkened a little in embarrassment. ‘She’s unwell. She was taken ill this morning.’
Goose said: ‘I’m not surprised. She didn’t sleep all night.’
‘But we need her!’ Handy cried desperately. He looked wildly at Goose and the stranger in turn. ‘She has to be here. Who’s going to lead us, if she can’t? Will you?’ His eyes settled on the face of the young woman in front of him.
She looked away. ‘I don’t know how to. I was only taught the words I’ve just said.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Goose said.
‘You?’ Her brother in law stared at her.
‘I’ve taken part in one of these things before.’
‘But… Shouldn’t the midwife…’
‘She isn’t here! I am!’ Goose’s voice was hoarse with strain. ‘Handy, what does it matter? We have to do this. It’s the only thing left that I can still do for my sister. Now let’s in the name of all the gods get it over with!’
Spotted Eagle had dragged a thick reed mat from the house, and now he tugged it along after him as he followed his father, leaving it by the entrance to the sweat bath while they scrambled into the dark, cramped space beyond.
I had been dreading the moment when the woman’s body was pulled out into the open. I was used to death and the bodies of the dead, but I remembered Star as she had been when I had seen her last: spirited, unafraid of anybody – even my elder brother, who intimidated almost everyone else he met – and laughing at the antics of her busy household. I had wanted to hold onto that image of her and not replace it with the sight of her as a corpse, but I had no choice now, because I had felt sorry for her husband and her sister, and I had agreed to help bear her to her grave. At least we were spared seeing her dead child: his body had been left in the sweat bath for now, to be disposed of separately, as was the custom.
‘They’ve not even covered her up,’ Flower Gatherer complained.
Goose heard him. ‘It’s not the custom to wrap women who die in childbirth.’ She busied herself over the body, straightening the skirt and blouse it had been dressed in like a mother fussing over her daughter on the morning of her wedding. I wondered how much of this activity and the brisk tone of her voice was a
