“Mistress! Here you are! A little late today. I have your usual box ready. I even have a fine packet of dried alsberry, early this season. I saved it especially for you.”
The spice seller was a hearty man who had recently succeeded his father in the trade. He was voluble, chattering on about his second wife’s pregnancy—her first—without needing anything from Asvi except nods and smiles.
Suddenly she was stricken by curiosity. “How much does it cost?” she asked, feeling the weight of the box in her hands as she took it from him because she was unable to say no.
He chuckled to cover a wince of discomfort. “You needn’t trouble yourself, Mistress. I’ll send my eldest son over to collect from Master Meklos. It is the very errand I used to do before my good father crossed. You’re a fortunate woman. Your husband never haggles over your expensive tastes!”
He turned to a new customer, leaving her standing with the box.
Should she go home with the spices? Or shop first for vegetables, grain, and fruit? Should she plan the evening’s meal, even though she could not cook it?
A cold sensation seeped against her right foot like the pressure of death’s chilly breath. When she glanced down, she found herself standing in a tiny puddle of liquid—she hoped it was water—saturating the silk of her indoor slippers. The spreading stain—what a waste of good silk!—catapulted her into movement. Carrying the spice box by its strap, she wove her way through the hum and bustle of the market to the lane where footwear was sold. She passed elegant stalls selling city shoes and city boots and fetched up in a quiet section where a rustic couple were shaping the hardy styles worn in the highlands. Even the shopkeepers’ hills accent felt well-worn and comfortable, though she heard in their long o’s and sharp ch’s how her own speech had been shortened and softened by so many years in the city. They treated her well; they could still hear the hints of her childhood in her voice.
Because no one knew Meklos was dead, and the short cape covered much of her widow’s dress, it was easy to direct them to collect from the household of such an illustrious merchant. She walked away shod in sturdy wool boots, following the melody of wind chimes. Meklos hadn’t liked the sound, which she associated with the ever-present voice of the wind on the slopes of the high hills where she had tended sheep as a girl, when the sky was her roof and the wind her companion. Here at the northwest corner of the great market arcade a person could see the east gate, open for the day. Chimes hung on either side because demons hated the high metallic tones and would hesitate to charge past them. The guards wore tiny chimes sewn to their brimmed hats. They stared straight ahead, not seeing her as she walked out of the gate into the outer ring of the city, although they cast measuring gazes at young women about their daily errands.
All household compounds huddled safely inside the high stone wall of the city proper, while the expansive outer ring of gardens was protected by a wooden palisade. The stockyards and tanneries lay in Tanners’ Town about a league away, because the beasts attracted demons. She walked past gardens on the eastern road toward the Morning Gate of the palisade. The crossing temple, where the dead set out for their final journey to the mountains of morning, blocked her view of the gate.
Built of bricks and capped with a massive dragon’s horn at each of its four corners, the compound had two entrances: one for the priests and one for the dead. No one else was allowed to enter, or leave, because the dead held within their transitioning flesh the seeds of lightning and disruptive magic. Demons fed on blood and magic—blood because it held the power of life, magic because it sprouted out of death. The priest gate, closed, faced toward the city walls.
Four young women hurried past her. By their faces she could guess they were sisters, around the ages of her own sons with perhaps ten or twelve years between oldest and youngest. As a bell began to clang on the other side of the compound, first one and then all the women broke into a run, three sobbing brokenly and one urging the others on.
The bell rang the weekly call for the long walk. Asvi hastened her steps, caught by the urgency of the young women. Following them around the far corner of the temple brought her in sight of the palisade’s Morning Gate.
Seven death wagons waited in a column, driven by priest-drovers and escorted by a cohort of priest-guards. Hook-mouthed, four-eyed, six-legged ghouls stirred restlessly in the traces, heads yearning repeatedly toward the canvas-covered wagon beds that concealed corpses. The seventh wagon was yoked to a quartet of stolid oxen who had heads lowered and shoulders bunched. Three elderly women huddled in the bed of the ox-drawn wagon. Another eight women waited by the wheels in their brown widow’s garb. Those eight were healthy enough to walk, although their heads were bowed and their hands folded with womanly resignation.
It was to one of these women that the sisters ran. They crowded around her as the first wagon jolted forward, headed out on the long walk. What bright, sorrowing faces they had! How concerned they looked, desperate and grieving! As Asvi walked closer, drawn by their tears, she saw how threadbare their clothing was, how their mother’s widow’s dress was a faded, much mended hand-me-down, buttoning up the front, the kind of dress bought at the ragpickers by a bride who can afford nothing better.
“We tried, Mama. We tried,” cried the eldest. “But we couldn’t raise enough. The priests kept raising the fee when they saw how desperate we are. What will we do without you?”
The second wagon moved in the wake of the first. The other women sidled away from the commotion, looking frightened. A woman’s grief was meant to be shared in private, not in so public and audacious a way.
“There, there, my girls.” The woman touched each of her daughters with tenderness. She might have been a good ten years older than Asvi, or maybe she had just lived harder on the edge of want. Struggle and deprivation aged a person, too, as it had aged Asvi’s mother, who at least had died in her own bed with her children beside her. “I know you did your best. The priests say women go ahead to make a comfortable home for those who will come after. I will be waiting when you make your crossing many years out, gods willing.”
The third wagon pulled forward as the young women wept and their mother comforted them. So had Posyon tried to comfort her, when he was the one forced to leave behind those who loved him.
A sensation as powerful as the beating of furious wings flamed in Asvi’s chest. She tugged off the obsidian and carnelian bead bracelet. Without plan, more like leaping off a cliff, she strode up to the little group as, with a grinding of axles, the fourth wagon moved. She slipped in among them with two fingers to her lips, for silence.
“Here.” As the young women gaped, surprised at her intrusion, she grasped the older woman’s arm quite rudely and yanked the bracelet onto her wrist. “You need it more than I do.”
A startled gaze raised to meet her own, brimming with tears. “But Mistress, this is yours.”
“I know what I am doing.” All the years of bowing before Meklos’s demands fell from her shoulders like a weight dropping. She felt almost dizzy with the sense that the walls had fallen away at long last. The fifth wagon jerked forward with a sharp command from its drover. “This is what the gods intend for me. You belong with the family who loves and needs you. Go. Hurry, before the priests notice.”