Jo Clayton: Drinker of Souls

The humming stops.

The Tekora moves out of the shadows to stand beside his wife. I stop breathing. He looks hungry. I feel like throwing up.

The Kadda wife looks around the room. I get the feeling she can see me. I close my eyes and pretend I’m a frog hopped in from the garden. Even with my eyes closed I can feel her looking at me; I’m sure she’s going to call me out from under the bed; I’m thinking it’s time to scoot out the door and over the wall. But nothing happens and I can’t resist sneaking another look.

The Kadda wife smiles up at the Tekora and takes her hand off his ann. It’s like she’s taken the bridle off him. He walks to his daughter’s bed. He looks down at the little girl, then over his shoulder at the witch. She nods. He bends over and whispers something I couldn’t make out that hurts my ears anyway. The girl gets up, follows him out of the room. His own daughter!

Hotea’s voice failed as indignation shook her. Her form wavered and threatened to tatter, but she steadied herself, closed her hand tight about her brother’s arm. He winced but didn’t pull away this time.

The witch looks around the room one more time then leaves too. I stay where I am, flat out under the bed. I am thinking hard, you better believe. No wonder the Tekora is neglecting his other wives. I see he is looking younger. His skin is softer and moister, he is plumper, moving more like a young man. I see that’s how she is buying him, then I think, he’s running out of daughters, he’s going to start on the bondmaids too soon for me. And I think, what odds the Kadda wife doesn’t make me the first one to go? None of us Hinas are going to finish out this bond year. I wait under the bed for a long time, afraid she’s going to come back and sniff me out, but nothing happens. I creep out from under the bed when I hear the first sleepy twitters of the warblers in the willows outside the door, a warning that dawn is close. If I have to spend the rest of my life exiled, I am going down that cliff. Now.

No more this and that and the other. Out. Away. Far away as I can get, fast as I can get there. The last daughter is still sleeping, so is the bondmaid, but she is going to wake soon and start screeching the minute she sees the third daughter is gone. I kick the wedge away and whip out the door into the garden.

The Kadda wife is waiting in the garden for me. I get maybe two steps before she grabs me. I try to jerk loose, but her cold hands are hard and strong as iron chains, and they drain my strength away somehow. It is as if she sucks it out of me. I am scared witless. I think she is going to drink me dry right there. She doesn’t, she pushes me back into the nursery and across it into the hallway. I go without making a sound, I can’t make a sound though I try screaming; something is pulling strings on my legs as if I were a puppet in a holy play. No, an unholy play.

She takes me high up in the palace to a small room under the roof, shoves me inside and a minute later there is this pain in the back of my head.

When I wake, it’s dark again-or still dark, I don’t know which. I am hanging on an iron frame like a bed stripped and set on end, my wrists and ankles are tied to the corner with ropes. There is a gag in my mouth, probably because of the open window high in the wall on my right, and a strong smell of anise, I am getting very tired of anise. The mix smells stale, as if it had been floating round the room a long time and that scares me all over again, more than if it’d been fresh. They hadn’t eaten the daughter yet; looks like I’m going to take her place this month. My wrists and ankles are burning, my mouth is like leather, my head feels like someone kicked it.

After a short panic, I start fiddling with the ropes and go a little crazy with relief when I find I know more about knots than whoever tied me. I get myself loose and start looking for some way out.

There is no latch on the inside of the door, just a hole for a latchstring or maybe a pin key. Nothing in the room I can use on it. I push the frame over to the window and climb up to look out, I climb carefully, the frame creaking as if it will collapse if I breathe too hard. I get halfway out the window and look down. There is nothing ,much between me and the water except a lot of straight up-and-down cliff and the surf is white wrinkles about black rocks. Way way down. The wind is blowing against my face, cold and damp, but it feels good.

Fingers touch my ankle. I know it’s her. I kick free before she can drain away my strength again. Somehow I keep myself from falling as I wiggle out the window, so scared all I know is that I have to get away fast. I hear cursing behind me and the squeal of metal as the frame collapses under her. I stand in the window and look down at the waves crashing against the rocks. No joy there. I look up. The endhorns of the eaves are close, but not close enough so I can reach them. Behind me I hear curses and other noises as she drags something to the window. She’s coming for me. I take a chance and jump. My hands slap around a horn and I am hanging free. I start pulling myself up. Fingers close about my ankles. I kick hard, harder, but can’t get loose. My hands slip.

So here I am. And here I stay till the Kadda witch is dead, down in the water with me, dead, you hear me, brother, you hear?

Aituatea winced as he felt a nip in his left shoulder.

“Look.” Her crystal arm sketched in touches of moonlight. Hotea jabbed her finger at the Phras ship.

The ship’s dark bulk was suddenly alive with lanthorns shining red and gold behind horn sides, dozens of them lighting up the deck and the swirl of dark forms moving over it. He could hear snatches of speech too broken for understanding, the blast of a horn as one of the figures leaned over the rail to call a water taxi from the Woda-an. The hornblower had to repeat the signal several times before the slide of a red lanthorn marked the passage of a taxi from the watercity to the blind ship.

A slim, energetic figure swung over the rail and went down the netting with skill and grace. Aituatea swallowed the sourness in his throat. A woman. By outline alone, even at this distance, a woman. The Drinker of Souls. He cursed under his breath. The weight of centuries of custom, of his sister’s shame and fury, of his own battered self-respect, all this pressed down on him, shoving him toward the thing that twisted his gut. He pressed his hand over his mouth, stifling an exclamation as two more forms balanced a moment on the rail then followed the woman down, small forms, children or dwarves or something. The old man on the mountain hadn’t said anything about companions. He glanced up at Hotea. She was staring hungrily at the woman, bent forward a little, her hands closed into fists, her form shivering with a terrible urgency. The strength of that need he hadn’t understood before, despite all those scolds, all those bitter accusations of cowardice and shame repeated so often he ceased to listen; he squirmed uncomfortably on the fleece.

The taxi came swiftly toward the wharf, the stern sweep worked by a young Woda girl, the lanthorn on the bow waking coppery highlights on sweaty skin the color of burnt honey. Her short black hair held off her face by a strip of red cloth knotted about her temples, she swayed back and forth in a kind of dance with the massive oar, her muscles flowing smoothly, her face blank and blandly animal, as if she lived for that moment wholly in the body. Aituatea stared at her, his tongue moving along dry lips, a tension in his groin reminding him how long it’d been since he’d had a woman. A stinking Woda bitch. He ground his teeth together and went on watching her. Frog ugly. In his Hina eyes she was a dirty beast, beastly with her strong coarse features, her broad shoulders, her short crooked legs-but she roused him until he was close to groaning. Six months since he’d been to a joyhouse, he’d tried it once after his sister fell in the bay but he couldn’t do anything there. Hotea’s ghost followed him everywhere as if a string tied her to his left shoulder; he tried to drive her off for a little bit, but she wouldn’t go; he thought maybe he could ignore her long enough to get his relief, but when he was with the girl he could feel Hotea’s eyes on him, those damn judging angry eyes, and he shriveled to nothing and had to pay the woman double so she wouldn’t spread talk about him.