Sullha #2
"I saw you talking with Vinnah," Burda said. "Do you know that she's one of those?" She swirled her finger next to her temple to indicate what she thought of those, meaning the Sacred Mothers.
Sullha hadn't realized that Burda had seen her talking to Number Eight's mother, but then she shouldn't have been surprised that she had. The woman saw everything somehow.
"I know," Sullha said carefully, keeping her voice low so the two women sitting at the next table over would not catch it. "Well, now I know. I didn't when I started talking to her. I was just curious about the melody she was humming."
Burda could never know the real reason Sullha had struck up a conversation with Vinnah. Or could she?
What if Burda could join the escape plan?
The woman's gray-streaked eyebrows lifted. "Don't you know what the humming means?"
Sullha gripped the cup tighter. "I'm not really familiar with the order, so it didn't occur to me."
"It's best to avoid them," Burda said. "They are aggressively recruiting, and if the Venerable Mothers notice you showing interest, they take it as a sign and start pestering you, thinking that you're considering joining them."
Sullha grimaced. "I am not."
"Of course, you are not. But don't be surprised if you find a whole circle at your door with sweet words about purpose and devotion, and the next time you turn around, there will be three of them sitting next to you at meals and explaining things. You won't be able to get rid of them."
Sullha hadn't thought of that.
"I know how to be rude when I want to. They'll give up on me pretty quickly."
Burda huffed. "Don't be so sure. They are consumed by religious fervor, and they are fanatics, so a little rudeness won't deter them. Also, you need to walk a careful line with those Sacred Mothers. Avoid saying anything that could be considered blasphemous."
"What are Sacred Mothers?" Tomek asked.
Sullha and Burda looked at each other over his head.
They had been careless, forgetting that the little guy had ears and was listening to their conversation.
"They are women who believe that having children is their divine calling." Sullha chose her words carefully. "They believe that they are doing Mortdh's work when they bring babies into the world."
Tomek's face wrinkled in confusion. "Aren't you a Sacred Mother?"
She laughed before she could stop herself, and Burda made a soft sound that sounded very suspiciously like a laugh, too.
"No, baby. I'm not a Sacred Mother."
"Why not? You had me."
"I had you because I wanted you. Not because I thought I was doing Mortdh's work. I had you because I wanted someone of my very own to love, and kiss, and hug, and tickle."
She tickled his side and he giggled, looking satisfied with her answer.
Saying out loud that she had borne her child for herself rather than for the god Mortdh skirted the edge of what was permitted, and if a Sacred Mother had been within earshot and told the guards about her blasphemy, the consequences could have been dire.
Burda was looking at her with an expression that was almost approving.
Tomek smacked his lips around the last bite of his sandwich and reached for a cookie. He bit into it with the same satisfied sound he had made over the chocolate milk and watching him thinned out the fog around the edges.
Burda waited until Tomek was busy with the cookie before leaning back behind him.
"They are crazy, you know." She dropped her voice to just above a whisper. "There is this look they get in their eyes, and once you learn to recognize it, you can't unsee it. It's a state of elation that has nothing to do with what's happening around them."
Sullha knew the look. She had seen it on Vinnah and on others before her, and Burda was right that it was unmistakable once she recognized it for what it was and then knew what to look for.
"I don't fault them for it, though," she said. "It makes life tolerable for them. I envy them for being able to believe that what's being done to them has some divine meaning, that it serves a higher purpose. It's much easier to live with it like that than knowing it doesn't."
"True," Burda agreed.
"I wish I could do it," Sullha said. "But I could never be one of them and pretend to believe in all that nonsense."
"Pretending is easy." Burda chuckled. "It's the believing that is hard." She pointed at the remaining cookie on the plate. "Eat it before the boy eats it for you."
Tomek had been eyeing the second cookie with interest, and Burda's comment broke whatever calculation he had been making about whether he should reach for it despite offering it to her previously. He looked at Sullha hopefully.
"Half," she said. "We split it."
Surprisingly, he shook his head. "You should eat it. The cookie will make you happy."
She leaned down and kissed his cheek. "You make me happy." She broke the cookie along its uneven edge and gave him the larger piece. "And watching you enjoy the cookie makes me happy too."
He took what she handed him and regarded her with those big eyes of his that sometimes looked much older than they should. "Maybe you should taste it first and then decide if you want me to eat the other half."
She folded his little fingers over the half cookie. "It's yours. Enjoy."
"Okay." He opened his fingers but didn't eat. He was waiting for her to take a bite of her portion of the cookie first.
He'd noticed that she'd been upset, but he didn't know what was troubling her, and that was confusing to him. He didn't know about Yaaf because Yaaf thralled him not to see him.
A realization suddenly coalesced inside of her as if her mind had been working out a puzzle without involving her in the process. What if Yaaf was a figment of her imagination?
The thought had arrived from somewhere Sullha had not been guarding, and once it was there, she couldn't swat it away.
Yaaf had thralled everyone who had seen him and his teammates to forget that they had ever seen them.
The other women at the playground, the children, the guards, even Burda.
None of them remembered that he had been there.
He had told Sullha so himself, and she had no reason to doubt it because the woman across from her right now, who knew everyone and missed nothing, had not made a single reference to the soldier who had been visiting Sullha almost daily.
Burda had no memory of him at all.
Tomek did not remember him either.
Which meant that Sullha was the only person who could confirm that Yaaf existed.
What if she had made him up?
What if the loneliness and the slow erosion of hope and the years of fantasizing about a different life had finally produced a coping mechanism that her mind had not been able to distinguish from reality?
What if she'd conjured a childhood friend out of desperation for connection, given him a face and a voice and a body, and then, because the conjuring had been too obvious, had layered on the implausible detail of him being part of a collective of minds to make the fantasy feel real?
It almost made sense.
The romantic interest explained why she had needed to invent him in the first place, the thralling explained why no one else could corroborate Yaaf's existence, and the collective mind twist explained why she could not have feelings for him other than friendship.
There was one big problem with that theory.
Sullha had a good imagination, but it wasn't that outlandish.
She could construct entire worlds inside her head and imagine cities and mountains and snow, but she would never have invented something as strange as eight minds in one body.
Her imagination ran toward freedom and ordinary experiences.
It did not lean toward the bizarre. The detail was too peculiar, too specific, too uncomfortable to be something she had generated inside her head for her own comfort.
Yaaf was real.
He was real, and he was also one part of a coalition of eight, and even though she couldn't verify anything about him, she had to live with the knowledge that her sanity depended on holding tight to a memory that no one else could confirm.
"Mama."
"Yes, baby."
"You are not eating your cookie."
She looked down at the small piece still in her hand and gave it to him. "You eat it. I don't want it."
The finality in her tone must have convinced him that there was no point in insisting, and he took it.
Nibbling on what was left of the cookie, Tomek started slumping until his small body was almost folded in half over the table.
Some children reacted to excess sugar with hyperactivity, but it had the opposite effect on Tomek. He was already half asleep.
"Your boy looks like he is about to fall face down on the table," Burda said.
"I'm not." He sat up straighter and tried to look alert, but the effect was undermined by the chocolate ring around his mouth, the cookie crumbs on his chin, and his drooping eyelids.
"I'm not tired," he said.
"You look tired."
"I'm not."
"Bath and bed for you, my darling."
"I don't need a bath." He lifted his hands, which he had washed in the bathroom before dragging her to the kitchen. "You see? They are clean. I was careful not to get any chocolate on my fingers."
"You are dirty all over. You have sand in your hair and mud on your knees. You need a bath."
He considered protesting further, but the cumulative weight of the day and the milk and the cookies was working against him, and he subsided with a long, theatrical sigh.
"Okay."
Sullha rose and picked up the empty plate. Burda waved her off when she reached for the cups.
"I'll handle these. Go get the boy cleaned up and in bed."
"Thank you for the tea and cookies."
"Anytime."
Sullha took Tomek's hand in hers and walked him toward the dormitories. The night had deepened while they had been eating, the path lit only by the lanterns now, and the air had cooled.
In their room she collected his night clothes, his towel, and the bar of soap she kept in a dish on the shelf beside their bed. He followed her toward the bathroom with a trudging gait.