He waited in silence while she fought for control.
“And then my aunt came in. She didn’t say anything. She picked up an old halter and snatched me away from him and tied it round my wrists and then tied it to a ring in the wall so that my arms were high above my head with my face against the wall and she gave him a riding stock and said, ‘Whip her.’
“He whipped me once. ‘You are never to do that again,’ she told me. ‘Whip her again. Harder. And again.’ Each time he whipped me she said, ‘Never.’ He did it ten times. I was sobbing and screaming.
“Then she untied me and took me into the kitchen and told me to strip off my top and lie face down on the floor. She rubbed some salve into my back and told me to dress again and took me out to the old dog-kennel and put a collar round my neck and chained it to a ring in the floor so I couldn’t stand up. She brought me scraps of meat and bread in a dog bowl and gave me a bowl of water to lap. She didn’t say anything till she let me out next evening. ‘You are less than a dog in this house,’ she told me. ‘Remember that. Now go and get the hens in and look for the eggs.’
“That night Saranja came to my room and whispered to me that she was going away. She asked if I wanted to come too, but I was too afraid.
“That’s all.”
Ribek rode on in silence. Maja waited. She felt as she had back then, spoiled, loathsome…
“Thank you for telling me,” he said gently, at last. “It must have been hard for you. Did that sort of thing happen often?”
“That was the only time. She never hit me herself.”
“And your father? You haven’t said anything about him.”
“I don’t know anything about him. I don’t know who he was, or where he’s gone to, if he’s still alive. I think he must have done something too dreadful to talk about. I wasn’t allowed to ask. My mother only cried when I did, and my aunt found out and tied me to my bed for a day and a night.”
“Mm. You haven’t asked Saranja, she says. She thought you knew.”
“Oh! Does she…? Can she…?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
He pushed Levanter forward till they were alongside Rocky. Maja could tell Saranja had been waiting for them from the way she looked down at her and smiled.
“My…Ribek says you…my father…?”
Still smiling, Saranja reached out and touched her cheek.
“I’m your half-sister, Maja,” she said gently. “I thought you knew, but they’d made you too afraid to talk about it. I hope that’s good news.”
She didn’t understand for a moment. Then she did. Her body went stiff. She gripped Ribek as hard as she could and gulped for breath.
“My uncle…,” she croaked. “And my mother…That’s why it was all my fault!”
Ribek snorted. Saranja pulled Rocky to a halt, and Levanter automatically stopped too. She let go of the reins, leaned across and took Maja’s hand between both of hers.
“No, Maja,” she said. “You must stop thinking like that. You’re the only person whose fault it wasn’t. My parents never loved each other. She loved somebody else but he didn’t want to live at Woodbourne. She married my father because she wanted a daughter who could hear the cedars. He was a poor man and he married her for the farm, but it was never his. It was hers, and she didn’t let him forget it. She gave him two sons to go with it, but they weren’t what she wanted and he knew they could never inherit the farm. Then she had me. After that she wouldn’t let him touch her.
“Something like that has happened again and again in our family, a woman forsaking love and wasting life trapped at Woodbourne for the sake of the story, but it’s never turned out so bad. Ever since I was small I’ve known I wasn’t going to let it happen to me, though she was determined that it should. I think I knew in my heart that if it did I would end up like her. Anyway, I believe that by the time I was born she already hated my father. That’s why she gave her sister a home when their parents died, though she treated her more as a maidservant than a sister. She must have known what would happen, and known that your mother was too great a ninny to say no. You were born so that she could hate him properly, and punish him by punishing you. That’s their fault, all three of them. Not yours.
“And you still haven’t told me if you’re happy about being my sister. Because I am. Very.”
“Oh, yes! Yes! But everything else…”
She still couldn’t take it in. It couldn’t change anything. It had all happened. But it wasn’t her fault, and that changed everything. It even seemed to change how she thought about Ribek. If her father had never been allowed to love her, and she’d never been given a chance to love him…And what had her aunt done, to make her mother so hopeless…?
“Ribek?”
“Hm?”
“Can we sing ‘Cherry Pits’ now?”
He still couldn’t sing in tune. But they were lovers in the song, weren’t they? She loved him for that, and found herself singing the song as if it were true. He laughed and did the same, but it wasn’t Ribek singing, of course, it was the lover in the song. He couldn’t sing in tune either.
When they’d finished all the verses they knew they invented some new ones until Maja couldn’t think of any more. Then she told him “The Owl-Witch” and he told her “The Miller’s Daughter” all over again, which lasted until, just as the eastern stars grew faint with daybreak, something changed. She knew what it was at once.
“Benayu’s awake,” she said, whispering as if she’d been in a sickroom.
Ribek leaned over and murmured the news to Saranja.
“I’ll tell him what Zara said,” she answered, and reined Rocky back.
Behind them Maja sensed the contact of two hands and heard the mutter of Saranja’s voice. She could feel Benayu’s almost overwhelming listlessness.
“Good moment for him to wake,” said Ribek. “Looks as if we’re here.”
Concentrating on events behind her Maja hadn’t noticed what was happening ahead. The sudden change made it a bit like coming to Larg all over again. They must have been climbing for some while back, but on a slope too gentle for her to be aware of it. Now they had reached the summit and were looking down a rather steeper slope into a world where it was already day.
The sun was not yet risen. Below the pale dawn sky lay a level plain, blazing with color, sheets of scarlet, purple, yellow and clear bright blue, spreading between barren outcrops of rock. Through this glory ran the Imperial Highway, with a way station immediately below them. The amazing dazzle of colors was—she concentrated—flowers!
“What…what…why…?” she stammered. “It isn’t magic, or I’d feel it.”
“Rain,” said Ribek. “Fellow at Larg told me about it. It happens for about three weeks this time of year almost every year. Rainstorms sweep up the coastal plain and last year’s seeds germinate and grow, and the eggs of several sorts of moth which have been lying there all through the dry season hatch and pupate and turn into moths just in time to pollinate the flowers so that they can produce a fresh lot of seeds, and the moths mate and lay their eggs ready for next year, and die. It may not be magic, but it’s magical.”
This was as far as the tribespeople would go. Ribek doled out chunks of salt to each of them, which was all they wanted by way of payment. As he did so they touched his cheek and he raised his hand in blessing.
“We’d better do that to the old lady,” he muttered. “There’s not a lot of them can talk to the water-spirit, just her and that lad there in this group. The ones who can—me too now, I suppose—are kind of special.”
He led the way, and Saranja and Maja copied him. The tribespeople responded with a few pleased hoots. The old woman hobbled to the litter, raised Benayu’s limp arm and touched his hand against her cheek. He stirred and muttered as if he’d been still asleep. Then they went their separate ways, the tribespeople back to their desert home and the travelers down to the Highway.