Jay Lake - Green

Kalimpura, seen from the Landward Road where it crosses Five Monkey Hill, is a riot of colors and curves and silvered spires topped with the sacred thunderbolts of Rav to ward off the lightning that comes with summer storms. Not that I understood as much when I first followed my feet west out of Bhopura.

So I strode over the hill amid the thickening traffic of the previous days and saw a city that at first looked like a giant tent encampment. The Kalimpuri did not measure their buildings with rulers and plumb lines. Rather, they built in the curves of billowing silk and the lines of prayer flags straining before the monsoon wind.

It was as if the gods of this place had dumped several hundred acres of masonry and precious metal and silk lengths to earth, but forgotten to assemble their toy.

“Ai,” said the oldest pilgrim, a woman bent nearly double, who walked with two sticks. The first word I’d heard from any of them.

I was struck by the whim of politeness. It seemed better than drawing my knife and killing again. “Yes, Mother?”

She stopped moving and stamped her sticks into the road three times. A cart behind her swerved to avoid the little knot we four made. The driver began to curse, saw the look in my eyes, and suddenly found great interest in calming his team.

“The Lily Goddess welcomes me home,” the old woman said.

“And blessings on you, I am sure.” Blessings, I thought. A mockery. I followed no gods, not at that time. Copper Downs had provided me with none, and Selistan had proven hollow.

“Blessings.” She peered close at me. “You’re a girl beneath that awful hair, I warrant. You need help, come ask around the temple for Mother Meiko.” She cackled, but a strange light filled her eyes. “There’s always a place for a woman of a certain bent.”

“Thank you, Mother.” I let my stride lengthen away from hers quickly enough. Company was good, but I did not want pity. One last hot meal and an hour to work on forgetting my sins, and I would be pleased to leave this turn of the Wheel behind. A line of bearers with huge orange cloths on their heads passed me. I slipped in with them.

People thronged toward the gates of Kalimpura. The portal that admits the Landward Road from the east is shaped like an orchid, tall and graceful and pointed with a set of doors within a larger set of doors. Traffic came in for a while, until the gate warden had seen enough of the flow; then it went out for a while. The gate was too narrow for two laden donkeys to pass one another, I later learned. What I learned that day was there was a terrible jam outside, which created a thriving business in paid line-standing, guard-bribing, and general intimidation.

“You, boy, get away from my patch,” grumbled a fat man with no fingers on his right hand.

“I’m not on your foolish patch,” I told him as the flank of a horse pushed me within his reach.

His left hand, complete with fist, snatched at me. I tried to slip away, but the fat man was strangely fast. He tugged me close, his breath foul in my face. “My father, and his father, and his father, worked this patch. You are wanting to be here, you are paying me, or you are in my pay.”

I slipped the knife from my sandal straps and slid the point between his arm and his body. “How much do you pay, then?”

He dropped me, laughing. “That’s more like it.” Leaning close again, he added, “If you are ever pointing steel at me again, boy, you shall be shitting your own knife out your ass while learning to breathe water through the hole in your throat.”

“So?” Reckless, crazed, caring nothing, I stood my ground.

“So go find a few eunuchs to bully, and take their copper paisas to stand in line. Then bring it all back to me.” He grinned. “Or I’ll have you killed.”

Thus I spent my first weeks in Kalimpura without ever passing within the walls of the city. Little Kareen, as my bully-master was known, lived on his patch. At night, one or another of the boys brought him a cotton shelter and his sleeping pillows, while more of us fetched hot wine and cold rice from the carts that never stopped circling out here.

It was an education. I saw every kind of pilgrim, prince, and trader, as well as the endless lines of qulis carrying food, bamboo, hardwoods, and bundled or basketed goods. All of Selistan moved on the backs of little brown men, I realized. Carts were used for longer distances, or loads too bulky and heavy to be carried, but if something could be moved in a day by a man, it was.

Women did not work so.

Some kept their husbands’ carts, and many followed as servants of the few wives who passed. There were none who labored on their own.

I had no real sense of how much choice the women of Copper Downs had in their lives, but I’d been raised by Petraean women. Except for Mistress Tirelle, they had come and gone freely from the Factor’s house. They gossiped of the city as if they moved about it at will. In my short time of freedom there between my escape and my flight, I had seen women in every crowd. Not under arms, surely, but carrying about the business of their lives as openly as men.

Here women were to be owned, either playpretties much as had once been intended for me, or as servants and tools. Only the poorest women-the cart vendors’ wives, the dung-pickers in their ash gray robes and drooping veils, the elderly sweepers who walked before the wealthy to ensure their feet trod on no shit-only they seemed to move with any freedom.

Copper Downs had been a prison for me, but Kalimpura was a prison for all women insofar as I could tell. No wonder Shar had been afraid for my papa’s land. There would have been nothing else for her except to be a servant in deepest poverty.

The bullyboys gave me a wide berth at the first. The story of me pulling a knife on Little Kareen was hot on their lips for a few days. Some of them feared my scars, wondering what I had done to earn them from some vengeful judge or village hetman. I made sure they saw my knife, which was better steel than their cheap, brittle iron blades, and I kept my eyes sharp and mean.

The teasing started soon enough. One boy, Ravi, bumped me as we carried food back to Little Kareen’s patch for the evening meal. I dropped a pot of warm millet, and was nearly beaten for it. I found him afterwards when he was peeing and thumped him on the back of the head with the butt of my bandit’s knife. He fell in his own puddle, from which I dragged him back to our little fire.

“Kareen, Ravi is so drunk, he cannot hold himself,” I announced, dropping the boy and rolling him over. Everyone but Kareen laughed. He looked thoughtful, then ordered Ravi dumped in a ditch and banished for three days.

After that, the cuts became more sly, but deeper. I was tripped twice in the dark. Ravi and two friends tried to thrash me, but I danced away from them. Later I slit the soles of their shoes, so they would have blisters on their feet.

Little Kareen did not like this. “It is one thing for boys to tumble and rough one another,” he announced one night over a badly made stew of some pale rubbery fish. I could have done so much more with the food here, though the spices were often divine. “It is another for hatred to grow.” He looked more closely at me. “Green, step forward.”

I did as he bade me.

The bully-master nodded, and someone crashed into my back. Ravi, and his two friends, and then most of the other boys besides. They pummeled and kicked me, the weight of them pushing me down so I could not dance away or draw my knife. I felt my teeth loosen, my ribs ache with sickening pain, as they smacked into me.

Even curled, crying, I knew they were not trying to kill me. Otherwise they would already have done so. On the ground amid my pain and humiliation, I swore I would never be caught beneath a mob again.