Interlude 9
You have been abandoned.
It happens without warning. One morning you wake to an empty house; only loyal Mitanni, who does not yet have the wits, the language, to spy for you standing in the garden. The captain is gone and worse:
He has taken your son.
Pares has vanished with all his effects and not even an attempt at a note, at a farewell. You race to the beach to discover tracks from a boat dragged from the forest to the surf. Beyond, a smudge of brown on the blue horizon marks the vessel they must have constructed in secret.
You scream your son’s name but it makes no difference.
You debate swimming, but it is an impossible distance, and you fear it will only provoke the marid.
Instead, you watch, helpless, pulling your hair and rending your garments, as the seas inevitably turn violent, the crashing waves rising like a pot overboiling.
Their small boat, so fragile, returns to your view, dragged by the unforgiving current.
You watch, a hand clasped against your mouth as the boat is battered about like a cat with a mouse, crunching and flipping.
You wail for Pares, for mercy; you beg the marid and all the gods you know.
To his credit, the captain does not abandon your son. By the time the ruined vessel is washed upon the shore, little more than broken timbers, the captain is a bloodied mess, carrying an equally bloody and far too still Pares. He drapes Pares on the sand, knocking at his back to bring up water.
“He was dragged under,” the captain cries. “I tried! I tried to save him!”
You drop to your knees beside Pares’s body. There is but a breath of life left, and you know it will not last. Blood trickles from his mouth and nose, his entire left side a bruise, his pelvis shattered. You smooth back the wet hair plastered across his face.
“Pares,” you implore.
“Amah . . .” The word is barely a whisper, a mix of pain and confusion in his bleary, bloodshot eyes. They shutter and though his chest gives a weak rise, you know he will not speak again. Will not open his eyes.
You do not have long.
The captain is weeping next to you, guilt radiating from his stooped shoulders.
The emotion seems genuine. Your son idolized him, after all, and the affection was returned.
The captain must have imagined himself a hero, seducing and tricking the evil witch so he might rescue her boy and flee this mad place.
“You have murdered my child,” you murmur. Anger ignites in your veins, and you lean into it most urgently. Anger has always hurt less than grief, so you let it devour you.
“He wanted to escape,” the captain stammers. He reaches out as though to touch Pares, but you slap his hands away. “To live. I am sorry! I have never seen waves like that—”
“Because you did not listen.” You so badly want to gather your son in your arms but fear it will hurt him.
This is all happening again. It is your daughter in the burning workshop, Harapsili and the babe in her belly.
So very, very many children—you do not think your heart can take it.
Pares cannot be gone, leaving you alone in this desolate place.
But still you cannot abide the prospect of placing the spindle in his possession.
The captain continues to blather and whine apologies. Useless man. Your rage grows. He arrived half dead to a land made fertile by your hand and all he has done since is take, take, take. How dare he return alive while Pares is dying?
And then it comes to you quite suddenly. Your conjuring magic works differently here; you’ve not been able to turn a heap of fallen leaves into a pile of wool.
But a life for a life? Well . . . In a great fury, your eyes flashing, power burning in your hands—you turn to the captain.
And you make him useful.
It is instinct and anguish more than any clear directive and yet the enchantment weaves through you, through your very core and it finds your roots, deep and eternal.
The captain shrieks and tries to run away, but his legs are already transforming, tripping him as they grow slender and knobby, his hands and feet turning the color of slate, hard as bone.
His wails become more pitched, more bestial until they are not human cries at all but panicked bleating.
When it is done, a sheep stands before you.
It is a primitive, feral thing. Its tawny coat is long and wild, the impressive ridged horns curling away from the soft black of its face long as sabers.
It is both familiar and foreign; its thick coat and steady legs are out of place in this tropical jungle, but you know these sheep as well as you once knew the soft swaddle in which you wrapped your babe, the intricate weave of your marital sheet.
These are the sheep of your lost world, the ones whose wool—softer than anything you have touched since—your people spun and weaved into the magnificent textiles that led to your annihilation.
And you know what you must do.
The process is rushed and imperfect. Time is a fleeting, vanishing thing—Pares’s lifeblood running into the sand—and so you hack away the sheep’s coat as quickly as possible, doing only what preparation is entirely necessary.
Another time, you would not dare rush the creation of a shroud; you would have lingered upon every detail, chasing perfection for the last gift, the last touch your beloved would ever receive.
But you are desperately hopeful this won’t be the last touch Pares receives.
And so, you make haste, washing the wool in one of the island’s creeks and letting it dry in the hot sun.
Its touch, its scent, the oils and the way it moves in your hands—it is all so achingly familiar and haunting that you weep, mourning your murdered world all over again.
You dare not move Pares but shade him with branches, dribbling water into his mouth.
His skin is scorching, his heartbeat sluggish.
He moaned the first night, deep rattling sounds that shattered a heart you didn’t think could take any more pain.
His cries have finally stopped, but you fear that means the end is closer.
Finally, though, the wool is dry and combed, ready for spinning.
You kneel at Pares’s side, the spindle that has been your home, your heart, and your prison for eons in one hand and fluffy fiber in the other.
You take a deep breath and then you open yourself, your mind, and your strange magic to Pares’s fates.
As with the dying sailor, it is not possibilities that you see but Pares himself.
Pressing his small face into your skirts as sea dragons and impossibly large waves crashed overhead.
The taste of honeyed figs in the palace.
The smell of smoke when you burned his first boat.
His dreams and his fears, his giddiness at the slightest praise from the captain, and guilty sorrow as he stole a final glance at your sleeping form before he left on the voyage that doomed him.
His soul, his spirit, the very many words all the civilizations that you’ve haunted have imagined for everything that makes Pares the young man he is .
. . you draw it from the ether and spin it into thread.
A ghostly breath parts your son’s bloodless lips, but his expression eases.
He appears almost at peace as you lose yourself in the rhythm and you spin and spin and spin.
When it is over, his body lies dead and cold.
But he is not gone, you can feel his presence, his warmth and his light in your thread, and so now you do take your time, building a loom of fallen branches and broken boat timbers.
You tie the sheep to a tree in your garden loosely enough so that it might forage upon weeds and set your thread, using gathered stones as loom weights.
Then you weave a shroud like no other, one that would have made your ancestors blanch. For you weave not symbols of death, the sacred emblems meant to ease passage to the world of the spirits, but those of life. Of creation. You do so without hesitation, as though possessed.
Only once do you pause. Your people had symbols to mark the journeys of the sun to indicate age, and acting upon a lurking fear in your heart, you weave not sixteen—the years your son lived to see, but eight.
For Pares was happiest at eight, his memories of the dying city replaced with grand adventures in the jungle, tearing around the island with imagined heroes.
When it is done, you tie the shroud off. You lay it upon your son’s corpse.
And the little boy you feared lost forever sits up with a smile.
You burst into tears, clutching him close.
“What’s wrong, Amah?” he asks, and starts as he glances behind him, at the ruined body of a young man. “Who is that?”
“A sailor,” you explain, quickly tying the shroud around his shoulders. You know, instinctively, that it should never be removed. “The poor man must have drowned. Why don’t we bury him?”
And so, you do, burying the bones of your son of blood under your home as your ancestors would have done while the son of your spirit and the sheep watch.
When the next band of shipwrecked mortals wash upon your beach, thirsty and afraid, you will be ready.
Those with a willingness to learn your tongue, to contribute to the foundation of a new and more perfect home will be embraced.
Indeed, they will discover a paradise, for that is what you build over the centuries.
With treasures and new souls splashed in from the sea, from your growing magic, you will spin a wonderful kingdom where none are divided by gender, by religion, by old hatreds or class.
Where your citizens live forever, never forced to endure the tortures that the rest of humanity inflicts upon one another.
When the rare woman arrives, she is feted and treated as a princess, encouraged to take multiple lovers until the new streets of your town sing with the laughter of children.
When there is confusion, when people hurt, you turn to your knowledge of potions and the land’s strange herbs to settle their spirits.
And when their physical bodies fail, you spin and weave them shrouds, granting them a new life while their bones are entombed below.
Those shrouds evolve, teach you new ways of using the thread your spindle births.
Tapestries with the patterns of grand gardens and cities; belts woven for health, for peace, for soothing away questions and anxieties and resistance.
Occasionally, yes, there is rebellion. Madness.
Souls will shatter and so you will take firmer control, as you did with Mitanni, leaving them dreamy husks set to easy, servile tasks.
But it is better than death. Better than conquest. You have lived so very long and know what is best for your people.
As for those unwilling to contribute? Well, your flock of goats and sheep grows as well.
You cannot replicate your rage at the captain, but you hardly need to.
With all the time in the world to experiment, you learn how to distill, how to concentrate your magic in novel ways—in potions. You are a witch, after all.
When the time comes, you choose a new host. Though you no longer need to feed off vengeance, you find yourself driven to those souls.
Your preference for women, for one both injured and fierce, remains.
They are a rarity you learn to savor, to nurture, even as you continue to nudge their own souls and faces aside upon each possession.
They nest in you either way, a blessing.
You will learn, however, that the women born of Khatti Ugal do not suffice. Grown in native, easy soil and surrounded by pleasant ghosts, there is nothing upon which an entity of vengeance can latch. But in comparison to male castaways, women are few and far between. So, when one does appear?
She is not let go very easily.