The Book of a Thousand Days (14 page)

Day 79

That boy Osol who winked at me, I saw him today winking at one of the cutter girls. I guess he's just a boy who winks. It doesn't matter, not in the least. And I'm not going to think about him anymore.

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Day 80

It's not as though I would've married Osol.

Day 82

Last night I saw Qacha staring at her hands --split fingers, raw skin torn from washing. Scrubber work is hard on the hands.

"My mama was pretty at my age," she said.

Then this morning, Cook saw Qacha rubbing mare's milk butter all over her fingers. There was screaming and cursing, and when it all died down, Gal and I found Qacha sitting on the ground outside the kitchen, weeping and too afraid to enter. I'd never seen her cry before. Her face showed a welt the shape of a wooden spoon.

"Cook says she'll have my hair torn out if I come back in. But my papa can't keep me in the stables and I've nowhere to go. If I leave the city, I'd have to leave Papa, and Koke... how'll I ever see Koke again?"

I could've sung her a song of comfort, but that wouldn't cure the cause of the sobbing. I guessed

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she'd hoped the butter would keep her hands pretty. Someone once said I had beautiful hands.

"Gal, come with me a minute, will you?" I said. "Qacha, I'm going to go see if we can't get Cook in a good mood before you ask for your post back."

Cook was sweating over a pot, greasy black smoke rushing at her face.

I said, "We're caught up on all the pots and--oh, Cook, you look hot as a fire stone. Would you let Gal stir for you a moment while you sit a step back from the heat?"

"For a moment," Cook said, though she looked suspicious.

I sat her down, brought a stool for her feet, and begged a chance to rub her shoulders. While she rested, I hummed.

What ails Cook? I wondered, humming, touching her shoulders, trying to get a sense of her pain. Soon my hum turned into a song. I started out singing the song for body aches, for tiredness that runs over all of you like water over stones, the one that begins, "Tell me again, how does it go?" I could feel Cook want to get up and I thought I'd lost her, but then I guess she chose to let herself feel better for a time. Her shoulders relaxed beneath my hands.

Taking the tune for body aches, I wove in the words

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for common pain, "Swan on her nest and the sunlight just so," while touching her shoulders, her back. I guessed her feet were sore, too, but I didn't dare touch them or she might figure out what I was up to. Her face was singed from smoke heat, her hands raw around calluses, and I closed my eyes and thought of the sound of the song going into those areas. She sighed, and I knew she was allowing the song to sink in. But there's usually something deeper than simple pain.

I tried weaving in a new song, the one for heartache that goes, "Tilly tilly, nar a black bird, nilly nilly, there a blue bird." I sang it softly, like you should when the hurt's buried deep and you want to ease it out slowly. It was just a guess, but who in all the realms doesn't have some heartache? Her shoulders tightened, then relaxed. I thought to go deeper.

"Prick, prick, blood on the cloth," I sang, now joining the song for body aches with the one for betrayal. No sooner had I begun than Cook lowered her head and sighed, long and sad as a wind stuck in a chimney. Suddenly, that large woman seemed as small and fragile as any tiny girl.

"Enough, I need to get back to work," said Cook, pushing me off and standing, but now her voice had lost its hard edge.

I rushed back to Qacha and told her now was

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a good time to apologize. When she asked to be a scrubber again, Cook scolded her right proper, but there wasn't fire behind it. Within an hour, Qacha was scraping pots beside us.

"I've never seen Cook so calm," she said, already laughing again.

Gal asked, "Do you muckers have the changing powers like the desert shamans? Trick things into being what they're not?"

Qacha and I laughed. It was an absurd idea.

"Just the opposite," Qacha said. "The songs nudge things to be what they really are--a healthy body, a heart as calm as a baby's in the womb."

I agreed. "But there's no power in them, they're just songs."

"Well, I don't know about that, Dashti," said Qacha. "I could hear you singing back there, and I've never known someone to combine two songs together. That was clever. And choosing the right songs just for Cook--it's quite a feat to tame a beast like her.''

"Cook did it, I just helped," I said.

My lady sidled up close to me, asking for a hand with a pot she couldn't get clean, and we all set in to work as hard as silence permits. A bit later, I noticed that Gal kept sneaking peeks at me, her face thoughtful.

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Later that night in the dark by our hearth, I'd just dropped off to sleep, my head on Qacha's leg, when something poked me. When I opened my eyes to darkness, I gasped, for a moment terrified that the whole world was gone, that I was trapped in the tower again. But it was just night, just Gal prodding me awake. I eased away from Saren, lifting her arm from mine so she wouldn't wake, and sat up.

"I hear you humming at me sometimes," Gal said. "I run away from it because I haven't wanted to be anything but sad. But..." Gal's chin trembled, and she rubbed viciously at her face with the backs of her hands.

"Easy, Gal."

"I just don't know," her voice was a grating whisper, "don't know if my family's dead, don't know if they'll ever come for me...."

"And you can't let yourself give up hoping," I said, "not until you're sure either way."

"But the hoping, that's what really hurts."

I reached for her and she shoved me off, then just as suddenly changed her mind and leaned into me, as if she'd never been hugged in her life and didn't know how to hug back.

I rocked her as we sat there, in the greasy dark of

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the kitchen, snores bumping around us. I sang the song for bitter sorrow, "Darker river, blacker river, faster river, pulling me." She cried, softly at first, then harder, and then calmed, her head resting on my lap. She's sleeping like a newborn now.

It's funny, I don't feel tired at all. So I sit here and wish and wish that I could find the song that would heal my own lady.

Day88

I'm hiding in the cheese closet and hating the close walls and dim light, and if Cook finds me I'll be out on my hide, but I must write this. Shria, the white-haired woman who first gave us work in the khan's house, came into the kitchens today. She said the khan had requested a mucker who knew the healing songs to attend to him, and Cook said, "Qacha, you're a mucker, aren't you?"

"Yes, but so's Dashti, and she's a better singer than I am, by leagues."

"Dashti would be best," said Gal, acting bold and pushing me right up to Shria. And she smiled like I didn't know she could. In the way that the sun's so bright in the city after the rain wipes the smoke from

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the air, that was Gal's face after crying all night. "Whatever ails the khan, Dashti will fix him right."

I stammered and looked at my lady, who offered no help.

And so Shria will come for me tomorrow. She'll take me to my lady's khan. I don't know what to think. I cannot think.

Day 89

All morning, my heart never let me forget what was to come.

Thump-thump, thump-thump,

it tapped at me. I didn't know when Shria would appear, so I stayed startled and alert all day. It reminded me of summers as a child before my brothers left, when our family set up our gher in the summer pastures and there were loads of children around. The Hunt, we'd play, some of us being animals hiding in the tall grass, the others searching us out with small bows and blunt arrows. How my heart would pound! I waited, crouched, prayed to Carthen, goddess of strength, and wanted to cry for the thrill and the terror. That's how I felt today.

I was up to my shoulders scrubbing a pot when white-haired Shria was suddenly before me.

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"You're the mucker girl?"

Thank the Ancestors that I didn't actually scream, though the sound felt as real in my mouth as a bite of potato.

"Come with me, but wash first. You smell like grease and smoke."

She watched me as I scrubbed my arms and face, as if to make sure I did it properly. I asked to bring Saren with me. My thought was if her khan saw her, he'd sweep her back into his love and the life of gentry, and all would be put to right. But Shria didn't even bother to say no as she walked away. I pled with my lady not to scream and to let Qacha take care of her, then I ran after the woman.

Shria led me down a lush corridor, through two chambers, and into a small, dark room with a low ceiling like that in a gher. My lady's khan sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning forward to speak with two other men, and Shria and I stood quietly, waiting to be acknowledged. I was glad she was there. I've spent so long alone with Saren, I'd nearly forgotten that on entering the presence of gentry, I must keep quiet until he acknowledged me, or until I died, whichever came first. Just then, I was relieved to stand still. My feet were wood planks, my back a brick wall. My heart was so loud in

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thumping I waited for Shria to scowl at me for being noisy.

You're a mucker, I reminded myself. You're not pretending to be Lady Saren and you're not trapped in a tower. You're just a mucker and a scrubber. You can be who you are just fine.

After a time, I found it interesting to watch her khan like that, my eyes free to rove over him. I could understand why my lady chose him. He must've been a fine boy, lean and strong, and now he had the bearing of a warrior. He also looked intelligent. Or at least there was humor in his eyes, which to my mind makes a person wiser. And I already know he can laugh.

Finally her khan looked up. Right at me. I think I might've gasped.

"Shria, is this the mucker girl? What's your name?"

"Dashti, my lord," I said, wondering if he'd ever known the name of Lady Saren's maid, but his eyes showed no recognition.

He dismissed Shria and sat on a low couch, continuing to address the two men. "Years ago, I met a mucker from Titor's Garden. She sang to me a healing song, made this old pain in my leg dissolve."

"If I'm not mistaken, my khan," said one of the men, "that's the injury I myself gave you."

"It was you, wasn't it, Batu?" Her khan's frown

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twitched with humor. "I'd forgotten. You were teaching that slicing maneuver with your sword and I turned my horse the wrong way."

He straightened out on the couch, and I knelt beside him, placing my hands on his leg just below his knee where I thought I could feel the subtle heat that hovers around pain. He nodded at me once as if to say that I had my hands on the right spot, then continued to converse with the men.

I didn't dare sing for him the same songs I had in the tower. If he realized who I was, that I'd given him my shirt, I think I would just crumble like old bread underfoot. Instead I offered the song for new wounds. It's a battle song, urgent, fiery, "Hold, hold, strike and flee." Though he was absorbed in his conversation, I could tell it wasn't working. He seemed disappointed, the unease of his pain making him tired of the whole world.

So I took the risk and voiced the same songs from the tower, going up with "High, high, a bird on a cloud," and then down with, "Tell her a secret that makes her sigh." I watched his face--his eyes closed briefly, his forehead relaxed, his lips let out a long breath. But no remembrance of me.

I've spent these years wondering if he held my shirt to his face, if he knew my scent, if he'd recognize the smell of my skin like a mother cat knows her

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own kits. But not even the sound of my singing made him blink.

Day 91

It's been two days since I sat on her khan's floor, my hands on his leg. Shria said she'd come again if the khan requested me. I don't sleep well at night for wondering what I should do. I hear my lady snoring. She's sleeping on the kitchen floor, still in her dirty apron because she was too tired from scrubbing all day to take it off. I'm surely the worst lady's maid who ever lived under the Eternal Blue Sky.