Nobody's Goddess (9 page)

As Luuk stood from the chair next to me to join the celebration, I squeezed his hand tightly. His puppy face met mine and he sat back down beside his owl-masked father and his sour-faced mother. But only a moment had passed when he stiffened. Summoning strength I didn’t know he had, he ripped his hand free from mine, walked across to the room to the end of the row, and hugged a girl seated between her parents.
Nissa
. She was grinning as she hugged him back.

Mother unhooked herself from Father’s embrace and laughed, pointing at Luuk and Nissa. “Look, everyone!” she shouted. “The Returned’s brother has found his goddess!”

Laughter. Clapping. My hands clasped feebly together.
Another one. Another coupling. All because of the first goddess. All because of a woman who appeared out of nowhere, barking out orders and vanishing from sight. All because of the lord and his goddess’s blessing.
My awful attempt at clapping ceased, my body flushed with rage.

There were two others who didn’t bother to laugh with joy at the little boy who’d found his goddess. At last, I saw that stunning face I’d never seen before as it pulled away from Elfriede with great effort, its flame-filled eyes still mesmerized by her features.

“Half the village is here,” observed Master Tailor. “How wonderful.” Everything was “wonderful, wonderful” with that man. Must be great to live in a rosy, wonderful version of your awful life.
If only I could. But I’m a woman, with a woman’s mind.

After the Returning, everyone had filed up to the Returned to smile and pretend like they cared for the happiness of a man and goddess not their own. That left the families of the goddess and her man off to the side, waiting for the ceremony to be over. I stood as far away from Jurij and Elfriede as I could without leaving the area. But next to Master Tailor stood Luuk and Nissa, their hands clasped, and every so often, I heard them giggling. There was no escaping it.

“Do you remember Elweard and Vena’s Returning? What, fifteen, twenty years ago?” asked Mother. She cradled a cup of wine in her hand. She’d offered me some, but I said no thanks. Wine, like the terrible laws of the village, made me nauseous. “The whole village was there.”

Father had one arm around Mother’s shoulder and the other stuck firmly across the front of her waist. “That one was a long time coming.”

Master Tailor had neither food nor drink nor a wife who loved him to occupy his hands. No surprise. He couldn’t eat with the mask on with all of the unrelated women about. But he could talk. “Didn’t they marry before the Returning?” Mistress Tailor looked up between bites of the roll she was stuffing into her mouth.

“I believe they got wed
seven years
before the Returning.” Alvilda, Master Tailor’s sister, gulped down most of the contents in her cup, which I suspected to have some pretty strong liquor. She sloshed the little remaining. “Vena was nine-and-twenty when she Returned Elweard’s love.”

Luuk’s puppy face actually tore away from Nissa, and he made a little choking noise. I wondered if he was gasping behind his mask. “So it’s not too late for you, Papa!”

Master Tailor laughed. “Your mother’s a bit older than nine-and-twenty, sweetheart.”

Mistress Tailor, her jaw clenched, knocked against him as she made her way back to the buffet table.

My gaze followed her, even as Mother jumped to pick up the conversation with Master Tailor with some unimportant comment about the Great Hall’s decorations. Mistress Tailor grabbed another roll and watched the crowd, her gaze resting on first one coupling, then the next. Although she was the mother of the Returned, although her other son had just found his goddess, no one spoke to her.

Alvilda was also watching. She nudged me with her elbow and lifted a finger off of her cup in Mistress Tailor’s direction. “They shame her. Even more than they shame me.”

“Is it really so bad not to Return love to your husband?”
At least
she
didn’t risk killing him before she was sure.

“Of course.” Alvilda still hadn’t finished the drink. She seemed fixated on creating little waves of turmoil within her cup. “It’s expected for you to Return love to your husband. If you can’t, you’re supposed to be honest about it and refuse him.”

“Dooming him to the commune? Isn’t it worse for a man to live like he’s dea—” I realized who I was talking to and clamped my mouth shut.

Alvilda laughed, and not out of mirth. There was something a little awkward about the way she spoke, and I wondered if she’d drunk too much. She wasn’t normally the type who did. “I know, I know. I sent a man there.” I noticed she didn’t refer to him as
her
man. She sloshed her cup again. “Better that than being constantly reminded of my failure to love him.”

“Then why do some women marry their men, if they don’t love them?”

“Who knows?” Alvilda leaned her head back and poured the last of the drink down her throat. She looked around for a place to toss the cup and dropped it on the edge of a nearby pillar. “Maybe they just want children? No other man but theirs will help them with that. Maybe they feel guilty about dooming a man to the commune?” She squinted at Mistress Tailor picking up a cup and filling it from a flask of wine. “Or maybe … maybe they truly hope they’ll love them someday, even though deep down they know it’s just a lie they tell themselves?” She patted me on the back. “Well, take care, Noll.” She gave one last pat on my shoulder. “I think I’m done celebrating for the day.”

I glimpsed Jurij with his arm around Elfriede as they hugged yet another couple of almost strangers from the village who had come for the free wine and food. I was done celebrating for a lifetime.

As Alvilda hugged her brother goodbye and rubbed a hand in Luuk’s mop of dark curls, Mother whispered something in Father’s ear and the two broke apart, Father’s face clearly full of the reluctance in his heart. He moved across the room to Jurij and Elfriede, and Mother came to visit me, sticking an arm through mine. She fanned a hand over her chest. “It’s hot in here. I thought we might take a walk.”

You mean perhaps I should explain to you in private what I’m doing here in a damp, torn, dirty dress.
We made our way through the crowd, Mother smiling and nodding at the few who looked away from their beloveds long enough to offer congratulations. When we broke free of the Great Hall door, I saw that night had already fallen. It was quiet in the village center. For once.

“Is there anything you want to tell me?” asked Mother.

Do you want to know why I’m a mess on the outside or on the inside?
I clenched my jaw, looking forward. We walked westward, a wise move for a pair of women who might want to scan the horizon from time to time.

“You know, your father wasn’t the first man I loved.”

That made me look at her. “I doubt that!” I wondered if I should point out that their mouths were practically sewn together most of the waking day. And the sleeping night.

Mother grinned. “No, it’s true.” The edges of her mouth drooped somewhat. “Of course, it was a doomed love. One man for every woman.”

“Or no men for one woman.”

Mother rubbed her shoulder into mine and tilted her head. “Come now, Noll, you know what I think about that.”

I shrugged. “It’s all right. I don’t mind, I was just … ”
Being angry
. “So. Tell me about this man of yours.”

“He wasn’t
my
man.” She, of course, took what I said literally. “He was Alvilda’s.”

Oh. “But that means—”

Mother tipped her head forward a bit. Her fingers dug into my skin. “He’s there.”

By
there
, she didn’t mean any of the rows of houses along the path we were walking, nor the fields of crops that went on for leagues until stopped by the western mountains. Certainly not Alvilda’s home at the western edge of the village, where she peddled her woodcarvings as Father’s only competitor.

No, between the fields and Alvilda’s lay a small outcropping of dilapidated shacks. Their roofs had holes in them. Their flooring, I was told, was just dirt and rocks and filth. Each shack looked likely to topple over. It was lucky for the men who lived there that no woman bothered spending much time nearby because if one happened to look up to the castle in the east, surely the entire commune would fall over.

“That’s sad. Still, if Alvilda didn’t love him … ” I knew I’d feel guilty in her place, but there was no avoiding it. “I mean, it doesn’t seem fair that we can’t love who we want to.”

Mother kept the slow pace toward the west, silent for a while. Then she opened her mouth, her lips almost trembling. “Women are not forced by nature to love. When we love, we do so of our own will. Men have no choice. But we have three: love at once, learn to love, or never love at all.”

“You forgot one. Love a man who will never love you.”

Mother squeezed my arm closer to her bosom. “That’s so poor a choice I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

We didn’t speak for a moment more. At last, I moved my tongue. “But if it does happen?”

Mother stopped. “Then you do the best you can to forget him.”

You don’t know how I feel. You couldn’t have loved that man like I love Jurij.
I strained to read her light-brown eyes. In the dying light, I thought I saw the glisten of a forgotten choice. “Do you still love him?”

Mother let go of my arms and fanned a hand at me. “Don’t be ridiculous. I was a child. That was long ago. Before your father found the goddess in me.”

I sighed. Of course. There couldn’t be anything to tarnish the sweet love between my parents. “So what was it about Father? The way he was bound to follow your every order?”
Useful for commanding a man to be a lonely loveless girl’s friend, that.

“
Noll.
” Mother shook her head, but there was a smile on her face. “To tell the truth, that part is sort of … disconcerting. Especially if you forget that anything you say that could possibly be construed as your direct command he does immediately. Even if you were joking.”

“Do the commands and obeying really die down after the Returning like they say?” I snorted, thinking of this morning with Father. “It doesn’t seem that way.”
Great. Jurij is going to keep pretending to be my friend, even though I could never live down what happened in the cavern.

“That takes a bit of the pressure off. If it doesn’t appear that way to you, well, that’s just the man acting out of love. But don’t confuse it with pre-Returning commands. Those are absolute.”

I thought of the little scene in the Great Hall. “I’m sure women like Mistress Tailor find that a benefit of not yet Returning their husbands’ affections.”

Mother rolled her eyes. “Yes, well, women like Siofra take advantage of it if you ask me. Maybe some little revenge for the poor men who had no choice but to love them in the first place.”

“Is that why women whose husbands are still masked seem to get more scorn than the women who send their men to the commune?”

“Well, at the very least, those women are honest with themselves. And by choosing to devote themselves to a profession or hobby, they have value in the community. Still, I wouldn’t wish any woman to be in either position.”

I forced myself to smile. “How lucky for you that it all worked out.”

Mother paused before speaking. “Yes.”

We stopped. We’d reached the western edge of the village. If we were going to go for a walk in the fields, we’d have to pass through the commune first. The stench was off-putting.

A man in a faded, cracked mask stumbled from one edge of the commune to the other. I couldn’t tell what animal his face had once resembled. I figured he wouldn’t remember, either.

He stopped and slumped over next to a basket. Dirt went flying as his rear hit the ground. The basket was full of bread and veggies, all of which were rotting. What didn’t make it for mulch for the fields got dumped to feed the men in the commune.
At least the lord doesn’t seem to care if these unloved men are not invited. Not that they’d go.

The man’s hand fumbled into the basket. He stuck the bread up beneath his mask, and I saw the mask bobbing. Between slow, slow bites of bread, he mumbled something, over and over and over.

“What’s he saying?”

“The name of his goddess.” Mother’s lips puckered. I wondered if the name was Alvilda, or if seeing any man in this state would give her the same reaction. “Let’s go.” She pulled us away in the opposite direction. Her gaze immediately sank to the dirt path and the footsteps we’d left behind. Mine did the same.

“So what happens if a woman stops loving her man? I mean after she’s already Returned to him?”
What happens if Elfriede wakes up tomorrow, her wonderful Returning day behind her, and gets bored with Jurij?

Mother shook her head. The smile on her face seemed strained. “You ask every possible question, Noll.”

“I just wondered if it’s ever happened before.”

Mother tilted her head one way and then the next. “He’s safe once the Returning takes place. No woman’s eyes can ever hurt him.” She pressed her shoulder into mine. “Didn’t you hear the lord’s blessing? He proves his worthiness to his goddess, and his reward is a safe life thereafter, no matter how the goddess’s feelings change.”