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, 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.
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 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 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]
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.
I guess singing the parting songs to my mama was the hardest thing I've ever done. I would've rather had her ghost haunting my every footstep than be alone. But I felt proud after I did it. And now she'll be waiting in the Ancestors' Realm, ready to sing me in.
