Dragonfly Song (3 page)

Just for a moment, she sees another face looking back at her, because Kelya is old enough to remember before the Lady was the Lady, all the way back to when she was a four-year-old girl.

Quickly, she undoes the careful plaits, rumpling the little girl's hair into its own messy curls. People see only what they expect: no one will look closely enough to see the Lady in a cast-off child with tangled hair.

Later she sees Aissa squatting outside the kitchen garden with the potter's daughter, making careful patterns in the dust: a ring of flowers in a circle of stones.

Kelya smiles to herself. The girl will be all right, she thinks: she'll make her own way.

The Bull King's ship sails into the fishers' cove. It's the biggest ship that's ever landed here, because the cove isn't sheltered enough for big trading ships, but the Bull King's men don't care. They row straight in, and when the hull crunches on the pebbles, some jump off to haul the ship up onto the beach. The others stand on their rowing benches with spears raised over their shoulders, or on the front deck, bows drawn with arrows ready to fly.

There are nearly sixty of them, wearing leather war helmets, with battleaxes or daggers at their belts as well as the spears and bows in their hands – the islanders know there's no point in fighting.

The captain and half the crew cross the beach to greet the Lady and the chief, leaving the rest to guard the ship. And although the captain uses a strange, barbaric language that the tall guard has to translate, the words stick in every islander's head.

‘The Bull King, king of the sea, priest of the Bull God, hears that your island is troubled by slaving raids and pirates. He promises that these will end from today. In return for his protection, each year you will pay twelve barrels of olive oil, twelve goat kids, twelve jugs of wine, twelve baskets of grain, twelve baskets of dried fish, twelve lengths of woven cloth – and a boy and a girl of thirteen summers to honour the god.'

‘Your god requires children as sacrifice?' demands the Lady.

‘Honour and glory, not sacrifice. They will join in the bull dances that the god loves. If they survive the year, they may return home and your island will be free of further tribute.'

‘Have any ever done so?'

The captain shrugs.

‘And if we refuse?' the Lady asks, though she knows the answer.

‘Then it will not be two youths, living and dying with glory. It will be your island and all its people, and there will be no honour in their deaths and enslavements.'

2

AFTER EIGHT SPRINGS IN THE SERVANTS' KITCHEN

The Hall and inner town are on a small plateau against the east side of the mountain. They're protected on three sides by a great rock wall, but the fourth side is the cliff – higher, steeper and more impossible to climb than any wall. The backs of the Hall and the goddess's sanctuary nestle into its hollows; the kitchen's cool room and the snakes' home are almost caves.

Between the sanctuary and the south wall, a giant boulder is wedged tight. It balances on an angle, as if the goddess has stopped it mid-bounce to protect her home. Its front is so shiny and smooth only a gecko could climb it, and it slopes out to shelter worshippers waiting to lay their offerings on the table at the sanctuary door. The top, as far as anyone can tell, slopes down to the cliff at its back. There is no way through.

No way for an adult, that is, or even a well-fed child. But if a thin-as-a-reed girl drops to the ground when
no one is looking, she can slither like a snake under the gap where the edge of the boulder doesn't quite meet the bottom of the wall.

When she was four or five or six she could huddle there as long as she liked, safely alone with her thoughts and fears. At seven the space started getting tight, but when she was eight she saw that if she squeezed along a little way further, under the bump that's jammed against the sanctuary, there was another gap where she could stand up straight.

Now that she's twelve, she's an expert in shinning up that gap to the top of the boulder. As long as she's careful to slide on her stomach once she's up there, no one can see her from the market square. And Aissa is always careful. It's the only way she knows how to be.

‘Aissa is always hiding,' the other servants say, ‘Always spying,' as if they hate her sharp eyes even more than her silent tongue. But when you're the cursed child, hiding is the safest thing to do. And when you're hiding, you spy.

The top of the boulder has two spying places.

The first is a chink in the south wall. If she presses her face to it she can see out to the wide world, over the hills and the shadows of distant islands far across the sea. Mama is out there somewhere.

She checks the chink in the wall in case there's a sign of Mama, but when she's watched for a while, and can see nothing on the hills except the brown dots of goats and nothing on the sea except the grey smudges of fishing boats, she wriggles on further.

Halfway along the boulder, on the side next to the sanctuary, is a hollow about as long as Aissa. Once she slides into that, not even an eagle could see her.

It needs to be safe, because this is where she is truly, dangerously, spying. From here, she can see straight into the sanctuary.

The goddess likes her home dark, so there are no windows, just a slit under the eaves. Aissa is not only
the first person to ever look in through it; she's the first person who's wanted to. The gods of this island are tricky beings – it's best not to make them angry by peering into forbidden places. But this is the one place where Aissa has never felt afraid, and because no one except Kelya has ever really talked to her, she doesn't know that she should. She just knows that she loves to stare into the darkness of the sanctuary, and the darker cave at the back where the snakes live. And since the only safe time to slip into her hiding place is before everyone else is awake and busy in the square, what she loves best is to watch the dawn ceremony as if she was in it herself.

By the flickering light of the torches on the walls, she can see the Lady select a pot from the snakes' cave, and drop in an offering: a frog maybe, or a lizard. As the chosen asp eats its meal, the Lady begins to sing, quietly, so that no one can hear beyond the closed sanctuary door. No one except the snakes and Aissa. Sometimes, as she lies on the cold rock listening to the strange, high notes, Aissa imagines that the Lady is singing for her.

But at the last new moon, Fila began her initiation into the mysteries. Aissa should have been struck deaf already for listening.

In the eight years since Fox Lady abandoned her at the gates, Aissa has grown from a shy four year old to sharp-faced twelve. The Lady's daughter Fila, two years younger than Aissa but half a head taller, has grown from sweet-faced toddler to sweet-faced girl.
That's just one of the differences between them. Aissa sees Fila every day, but Fila has never seen Aissa, not actually seen her, not looked in her eyes and wondered who is behind them. She doesn't need to. Aissa will always scurry out of her way if she is sweeping or scrubbing or cleaning the privies when Fila passes.

After all, Fila is the Lady's firstborn daughter, despite the stories of an earlier one that died, and one day Fila will become the Lady. She is loved by all.

Aissa, as far as she knows, is loved by no one. Kelya has gone blind and knows that if she can't protect the child, favouring her will make things worse. So Aissa has sunk to the bottom of the heap; spoken to only in anger, the last to eat, the coldest bed place in winter, the stuffiest in summer, the lowest, filthiest, stinkiest chores. She doesn't even have a nickname like the other servants: ‘No-Name', they call her. ‘Cursed child; the girl even the raiders didn't want.'

Fila's only problem is that she has a voice to scare toads. The snakes do not come to her; they are agitated and hiss, and if the Lady didn't sing them away, her treasured daughter would die a swollen, painful death twenty times over.

Aissa still has no voice at all and has never been near enough to the snakes to bother them.

Luckily, Fila doesn't have to sing this morning: her only task is to take a cricket from a small wicker cage and drop it into a pot for the chosen snake. She can just about manage a cricket without crying, though Aissa
can see her cringe. A few days ago, Fila cried so much that she dropped a wriggling mouse onto the floor. The mouse quickly disappeared. The Lady replaced the snake's pot in the cave and brought out the one she'd used the day before. She didn't say anything, but Aissa could hear the sharp anger in her song.

Aissa doesn't enjoy seeing the mice being dropped to their death, but she doesn't feel sorry for them. The snakes have to eat, and it's a mouse's fate to be eaten. The same with the crickets – besides, she likes eating crickets herself, crispy and fried and swiped off a market stall.

When the Lady steps outside, Aissa inches forward till she can look right out through the open sanctuary doors. Watching from behind the scenes, she can't see the crowds staring in through the gate, but she can imagine what they're seeing. She knows how they'll be blinded by the rising sun and how tall and dark and magnificent the Lady will seem against it. When the song begins again, calling the snake up to the Lady's arms and the sun to the skies, the sound lifts Aissa right up out of her body so that it is worth all the risks to be hidden on a rock and hear it, secret and alone. And when she goes back into her body, the song goes with her, so that sometimes, when she needs it, she can hear it again.

The song ends. The square will soon start filling up with people; Aissa needs to leave now – she can't risk someone seeing her sliding out from under the boulder. That could be worse than the beating Squint-Eye has promised her if she doesn't sweep up the dog droppings.

But something is different this morning. After the Lady steps back into the sanctuary and releases the snake to its cave, she turns to the altar. It is crowded with small statues in wood, stone and bronze, amber beads and gold jewellery. The Lady picks them up and rearranges them into a new pattern, talking softly all the while, reminding the goddess of what they've given her. Finally she places the raiders' bronze dagger right in the centre, surrounded by all the other riches.

‘Use this symbol of the Bull King's power to strengthen your people,' she says, loud enough for Aissa to hear.

Then she adds something that makes no sense at all. ‘I gave you my own. Will you let the bull take more?'

The goddess doesn't answer, but the secret door from the Lady's rooms opens. Fila leads Kelya in.

‘What are the signs?' the Lady asks abruptly.

‘My wise-women have seen two,' says blind Kelya. ‘A skylark escaping from an eagle to rise again singing. Later they found an eagle's feather woven into its nest. And on the same day, a dragonfly such as they had never seen, wondrously large and blue, hovering above the Source.'

‘A dragonfly?' the Lady repeats.

‘Dragonfly?' Aissa echoes in her mind, the word nudging at her from some long-ago memory.

‘That's what they saw,' says Kelya.

‘That was the name of my mother's grandmother. Could it be her spirit returning to save us from the bull?'

‘Only the goddess knows,' says Kelya.

So the Lady sprinkles white barley meal on the floor of the snakes' cave, calls the great house snake out with an offering of milk, and tries to find the goddess's answer in the pattern that he draws.