Sarah Zettel - Reclamation

Then came her Marking Day. At the end of that day, she lay on her mat, her hands wrapped in bandages and throbbing from the pain. The leather belt her old grandmother had fastened around her chafed her waist and legs miserably. Outside, the night’s hail clattered against the roof. The wind rocked the house on its stilts. Its fingers found their way through the cracks in the walls and drew themselves across her. She stared into the darkness, hearing the sounds of her father and little sisters breathing and snoring all around her and wishing for sleep to come.

The floor had creaked from gentle steps and she smelled her mother’s musky breath.

“Get up, Aria, I’ve something to show you.”

She’d sat up, blinking. Mother had taken her by the arm right above the ragged bandages and led her out into the other room. The fire on the central hearthstone was nothing but red coals buried in ash. Mother poked them carefully with a stick until the tiniest flames flickered up. The dim orange light showed up her wrinkled, leathery face and Aria wondered why her mother was smiling. She never had before.

“Now that you’ve lived to be marked, Aria, I can start telling you about your name. Stone in the Wall. Aria Born of the Black Wall. What I say is true, daughter of my blood, but you must never, ever tell anyone. If someone comes who has need of you, they will already know. If anyone else hears, you’ll be killed for a Heretic. What I say is from the Nameless Powers to our family, do you understand?”

Aria didn’t, but she’d nodded anyway. Mother’s anxious tones sent chills through her that were worse than the ones the wind brought.

Mother sat back and folded her hands like she was making a vow or a curse. She stared at the moss-chinked wickerwork that made up their house walls. She spoke in measured cadences like she did when she was reciting the Words. “When the Nameless Powers left the Realm for the place beyond the Black Wall, they knew that the people would have need of aid and protection. So they gave their Words to the Teachers and their authority to the Royals. They set the seasons and the days in motion so that the people would have time and life.

“But they knew the Aunorante Sangh were waiting with their tricks and their traps. They knew, for they were the Nameless Powers and nothing is hidden from them, that the Aunorante Sangh might send servants to disrupt the workings of the Realm, which would kill the People.

“To prepare against this, the Nameless Powers spoke new words and these words became jewels. They took each jewel and they spoke its name over it. As they spoke, the jewels split into four parts. Three parts remained stone, but the fourth became a person.

“The names that the Powers spoke for the jewels gave the stones the power to hear and understand the workings of the world, but only in the hands of the people who had been made from the jewel’s substance. The Nameless scattered the people across the world. One became a Royal, one a Noble, one a Bondless, one a Bonded, and one a Notouch.

“The years passed and the stones and their names were handed from parents to children. But the names became corrupted and garbled by the speaking of men and, gradually, the truth was lost by all, except the Notouch. For we who cannot touch power or coinage cannot be distracted by the ways of the world.

“The Nameless Powers, where they watched through the Black Wall, saw the Aunorante Sangh breeding their servants the way a farmer breeds pigs. They saw, too, that they were building their own Realm that their servants might have a fortress from which to launch attacks upon the People. The Nameless knew those servants would one day be sent into the Realm. So the Nameless Powers spoke new words. Metthew Garismit, they said, and they created their own servant and opened the Black Wall so he might walk down to the Realm.

“Garismit knew his name from the beginning and he knew that to save the Realm from the Aunorante Sangh, he would need to move it to where the Aunorante Sangh could not reach it.

“The Teachers say that Garismit went into the belly of the Realm and spoke to it with its own name. That is not all he did, Aria.

“To make the world hear him, and to hear it, he needed the stones and their keepers. He went first to the Royal and the Noble. But they had hidden their stones in their money houses and would not dig them out. He went to the Bondless, but they had gambled the stones away years ago and did not know where they were. He went to the Bonded, but the slave had given the stones for a master’s favor and did not know where they were.

“So Garismit went to the Notouch. He called her by her name—Clear Sight—and Clear Sight took her stones into her hands. Garismit opened the ground for Clear Sight and he led her down the paths to the center of the earth. The stones became eyes and ears and the Realm saw Garismit and heard him as he spoke its name and it moved at his command.”

Mother had rumbled with the thong of a leather pouch then. Aria could still remember the musty smell that rose from the leather.

“Hold out your hands, daughter.”

Feeling like she was dreaming, Aria had held out her bandaged hands. Her mother laid the stones in them and Aria gasped, partly from the pain of their smooth weight against her fresh hand marks, but mostly from their beauty.

“These are Clear Sight’s stones,” Mother said. “We are her daughters, named by the Nameless and born of their substance. We serve the Nameless by keeping them safe and close. The Aunorante Sangh still seek us. The Nameless Powers may send another servant to save us from them again. The Nameless themselves may return. When they do, they will need the stones and we must be ready with them.” Mother tucked her hand under Aria’s chin and raised her daughter’s eyes away from the beautiful spheres. “This is the beginning of the truth, daughter of my blood, Aria of the Black Wall. There is more, and I will teach it to you. We can only speak of these things when the world is protected by the Black Wall. When the sun comes again, you cannot let anyone know anything has changed for you.”

Mother’d taken the stones back, then led her daughter back to her mat. Aria spent that night shivering in the dark, but now from wonder rather than cold.

Aria kept her silence as she traveled with the other women and children to the cities and she did not show anything had changed. But something had. She knew it when she listened to the Teachers. Thoughts crept unbidden into her head when she was supposed to be filling it with the words of the Nameless Powers and Metthew Garismit.

... the Notouch are the dirt and stone of the world, but I’m not Notouch. I’m born of the stones and born of the Black Wall. If the Teachers could lose the story of the stones, what else could they lose?

If names given by the Nameless can become corrupted by the speaking of men, what else can become corrupted?

And always, always, through the other thoughts, through the anger that blossomed and the rebellion that grew into willful and deliberate heresy she remembered that the Nameless Powers had condemned their best to be Notouch. The knowledge of who she was and how she had been wronged by the Nameless Powers and all their servants shaped her life from her Marking Day to the day she’d walked unafraid up to the Skymen and asked to know how she could be of use.

She caressed the pouch that held her namestones. All her life she had longed to be recognized for what she really was, and now it was happening. These Skymen with their naked hands and their ignorance of the Words of the Nameless treated her like a trophy. She should have been reveling in it, using it for all it was worth. But all she wanted to do was get home, get the stones back to her home and her daughter, where they belonged. There wasn’t a minute that went by that she didn’t wonder what would happen if she lost her life, lost the stones out here. Then she would not only have lied to Little Eye, she would have taken away her children’s only hope of getting out of the mud.