Bloodmind (21 page)

I have hurt a male.

I am in danger. House Father will kill me when he finds out.

I have to get out of here.

And I forced the weak, wailing, helpless person away and ran up the stairs of the root cellar, pushing back the training which told me that I should not move too quickly, should keep my head
down at all times, should be quiet. My footsteps slapped on the floorboards and they sounded like my heart. When I reached the door, I looked into the main room and my daughter Luck-Still-to-Come
was kneeling on the boards with a scrubbing brush. The scent of strong soap filled the room. Her face was screwed like a fist: she was concentrating. She did not look up, and I wrenched my gaze
away. I pulled the folds of the slip-gown down over my head and went out into the burning day. Just another woman going about her errands, just another
thing.

I knew the layout of my neighbourhood, but with this new understanding, everything looked different, seen through my fear and my need to survive. I knew where the gate was, because the household
women weren’t supposed to go near it, though the farm-wives came and went. I remembered my one trip through the gate to a farm: the green fields beyond, the sprinkler systems. I wanted to go
there now, to see the trees and the river.

No one paid any attention to me as I made my way through the marketplace. I kept my head down, looked at my feet, and now, it was difficult. I felt as though there was something hanging over my
head, bright as the sun, telling everyone that I had changed. Then the gate was there: huge slabs of packed earth, with a flash of green beyond. It was open, but guarded. I scurried through. The
guards were talking to a farmer; they paid no attention to me. It was easy and there I was, out among the fields.

That was that. I just kept going and going. Sometimes the bird came to me and at first I ran, but later I grew used to it. It never hurt me – in fact, I could not even feel its feathers as
they brushed against my face. I slept in the ditches and stole roots and leaves. Every time I did so, I learned more. I started applying words to things – words that I’d heard before,
but never understood. ‘Tree’ and ‘night’ and ‘sun’ and ‘wind’.

No one stopped me or spoke to me: I was just a woman. When I reached the end of the farmlands and there were no more fields, I hesitated for a moment, but fear drove me on. The desert was ahead
and I went into it. I walked and walked, doing so at night because it was colder, and hiding in the rocks during the day. I sucked a pebble and once or twice, it rained. In the morning, the desert
was a sea of flowers and I ate some of them, picking them as I walked. Sometimes my stomach hurt. I came to a riverbed that was almost dry and I followed it, sipping muddy water. I had no idea
where I was going, only that it was
away,
and that this was a good thing. My daughters came to me, running through the rocks, and once I saw First Joy, standing on a high crag and staring at
me. I was glad, because there was no sign of blood on him.

And then I came down from the rocks and there was the city. I was afraid at first, and waited to see what kind of men came in and out of it. But no one did and eventually I screwed up my courage
and went in through the eastern gate. There was rainwater in stone tanks, and leaves growing along the cracks of the pavements. Later, I found the old fruit trees. I made a nest up in the bell
tower, because it was high and safe and the figures on the wall were there. I talked to them, at night, making meaningless sounds. Six months after that, another woman came. And she had more words,
and we put them together.

My story.
Different from Khainet’s, because by that time – some years before, in fact – the women who reached the city had started talking about voices in their heads,
more maps and pictures,
instructions.
And unlike me, they found women to welcome them, although sometimes, deep in the night, I missed the peace of those early days, the silences.

And yet. Khainet had followed a familiar if mysterious pattern; how extraordinary could she be? I needed to speak to Mayest again, maybe persuade Khainet to talk with her in my presence. But I
still didn’t trust Mayest, and I still didn’t know why.

It was late in the afternoon now, and the rain had completely burned away, leaving a slightly steamy heat. I went down through the winding streets to Tare’s house complex, expecting to
find Tare herself there, hanging about the four women. But the house complex appeared to be empty and quiet, with only a big insect zooming around in the kitchen, trapped and unable to find its way
through the window spaces. I picked up a rag and flapped at it, and after a few minutes it shot through the window in a flash of blue-green and out into the day.

I cannot say, now, that I felt something was wrong. Looking back, it seems that there should have been something, some clue to what was to come, some message in the shafts of sunlight. But as I
went up the stairs, looking for Mayest, there was no sign that anything was wrong.

I heard the breathing first. I was walking along the corridor that led to the guest chambers, relieved at being in this cool earthen place and out of the hot sunlight, even though the complex
reminded me too much of the root cellar. But something was disturbing the quiet: rhythmic gasps that reminded me of House Father and those sudden dreadful flurries of sex.

I knew that some of the women slept together. I never had; I did not want to be touched after my life with House Father, and every night I was thankful that there was no one else to share my
bed. But I had no objections to what the women did, if that was what they wanted. Perhaps Mayest’s group were lovers, or contained lovers among them. I did not want to intrude – to be
more honest, I did not want to see – and so I hung back for a moment, but there was something in the sound which was not pleasure, more as though the person was trying to draw in enough breath to
survive.

I stepped through the door of the nearest guest chamber. Mayest was lying on the floor in a crumple, with one arm outflung. There was a seep of blood from the back of her head. Her eyes were
open and staring. I thought at first that her face was white, and the room was darker. There was the smell of roots and earth, but only for a moment. Then it was gone.

Khainet was crouching over her, the source of that painful rasping breath. Her arms were wrapped around herself, clutching herself tight as though she might fly apart if she let go. But she was
not rocking, and when she glanced up I saw a flash of something fierce in her face.

‘What happened?’ I barely recognized my own voice. My first thought was that Khainet had killed her, but I pushed it away, down to the cellar of my mind.

‘She fell.’ Her voice was loud and defensive. ‘She slipped on the tiles and she hit her head.’

We stared at one another for a moment.

‘Then that’s what happened,’ I heard myself say, as though I hadn’t believed her, as if saying it would make it real. ‘Where’s everyone else?’

‘Tare and the women went to the orchards for the last of the fruit. Tare wanted to get it done. They took the other three women with them, to show them the fields and how we do things
here. I think Tare wanted Mayest to go with them, too, but Mayest stayed behind and she caught me in the hallway. She asked me to come and see her. I didn’t know how to say no.’

I looked at Mayest’s body and felt a sort of pity, because at the back of it lay waves and waves of root-smelling horror and I could not allow myself to feel that.

Khainet said, ‘I don’t want to stay here.’

‘I understand.’ I was blocking out everything except the need for flight, including what she had done. It was like that first knowledge of self-awareness, the overwhelming impulse to
get out.
Everything else that I was: elder of Edge, the responsible person, the one who sorted out problems – it was as though the thick rind of this had been pared away and left me nothing
but a desperate skin. I was again the woman who had fled across the desert, nothing more.

But there was no other ruined city waiting for us, I was certain of that. Only Iznar, where I would not go, and the mountain colony where – if Khainet had really killed Mayest – we
could not go. I would have to take Khainet into the mountains near the city, and hide her, then return. There was water there, and I would find a way of getting food to her. No one knew I had come
here, to Tare’s house. If we left now, by one of the wall passages, I could be back before nightfall and could pretend to be surprised at the death, which would be discovered by then. But
they would think that Khainet had fled alone.

The other choice would be for her to stay here, and face the questions. If the woman she’d killed had been one of the colony, one of our own, I would have put her in bonds myself. But
Mayest was different, Mayest was an outsider, and in some way that I did not yet understand, Mayest was a threat.

‘Hunan?’ Khainet spoke in a whisper. ‘What are we going to do?’

We.
If I had been unable to decide before, I’d made up my mind now.

‘We’re leaving,’ I said.

I expected the household to return at any moment, and Mayest’s companions with them. All we took with us – gathered in haste from Tare’s kitchen – was food and water: the
dried vegetable and fruit strips which the women had laid down for the winter, and strung gourds filled from the well bucket. Then we were out through the back of the house, into the winding
streets where no one lived, the ruined hives that we had still not properly explored. Old wood creaked and groaned in a rising wind and I didn’t like the sound of that; it meant another storm
was on its way.

I saw Khainet look around her as we drew closer to the little-used eastern gate; recent events did not seem to have made her less curious. And I was curious, too. I wanted the truth about what
had happened to Mayest, but something told me that Khainet would not give me that truth until we were both well away.

More ruins, their windows eyes onto black earthy rooms, like that place where I had once felt so safe.

As we neared the eastern gate, the streets grew narrower, so that someone in the windows of one house could have touched the fingers of someone in the house opposite. I’d never understood
why the districts were so different. But I was glad of the change, because it meant that the streets now lay in shadow, and were cooler. Khainet was shivering, however, and I did not think it was a
result of the changing temperature. I touched her shoulder, and she reached back without looking and clasped my hand in a grip that hurt. We were nearly at the gate. I kept listening out for shouts
behind us, for Tare’s household to have come home and raised the alarm, but the city was silent.

When we finally reached the eastern gate, there was no one there. The gate itself was massive: slabs of solid stone surrounded by earthen bricks that had long since caved in to block the
entrance. An enemy could not have forced their way through it without heavy firepower. It reminded me of the massive gates of Iznar. Once more I seemed to see a screaming woman fall.

But there was a way out: a little tunnel winding through the wall. I didn’t know what it had been, but suspected that it was part of the old irrigation system: it led down under the wall
and there was a channel running through its smooth stone floor. It had small hinged valves that perhaps used to control the flow but which were now broken. Water still seeped through it, during the
time of rains. Like now. I’d wondered before whether the valves had been shattered by the sudden force of too much water.

I gave Khainet a hand down the broken steps that led to the channel and then followed her myself. More earthen coolness, a damp breath from bricks that had long ago been smoothed into mud. It
was not very far through the wall, and minutes later we were coming out into the sunlight. The edge of the desert lay before us, the rocks sharp and red in the early evening light, casting hard
shadows. I glanced back up at the wall. No one. Khainet was already hastening into the limited shelter of the rocks and I was close behind her. The rocks were too sharp and scorching to walk on and
we made our way between them instead, up through a deep gulley that gave a bit of shade. We climbed for a while, already drenched in sweat, and sharing one of the water gourds between us in
silence. I wondered if Khainet regretted what she had done. I couldn’t allow myself regret, not now, but it was hard. I looked back once and the colony lay far enough below us that I could
see over the eastern wall. The bell tower rose in its spire above the city, with the drift of efreets circling around it. Beyond the city, along the sea horizon, the storm clouds were building again and that made me
nervous. I knew how fast the storms could come in and this, I’d learned from years at the desert’s edge, was exactly the kind of place in which one might expect flash floods. But we had
no choice, we had to stay in the gulley: the rock walls were too sheer to climb up. If a flood came, better hope we’d be drowned, rather than swept back down to be hammered against the mass
of the eastern wall. We would be broken like twigs.

I didn’t know this side of the city well, but Seliye and I had come up here once, exploring. We’d filled the tank with fruit oil and driven the land-car up the gulley, during one of
the long dry seasons with the seedpods exploding and crackling in the heat and sending showers of seeds down into the gulley. We’d followed it up as far as a series of piled-up rocks –
whether eaten by the wind or put there by the goddess folk, I did not know – and then the land flattened out into a level place, pockmarked with scratches and potholes. If we could make it as
far as the level place before the rain came, we’d have a good chance of making it further up into the mountains. And we could refill the water gourds, too.

That was my hope. But as the evening wore on, it became clear to me that the storm was coming in too fast. Above the gulley, the sky was dark green, and the first crack of lightning, a vivid
white, made us both jump. Moments after that, the first fat drops of rain spattered into the dust of the gulley.