Afterwards, I lit two small fires to him and made a speaking in the manner of the Stone Coast. I had nothing good to say of the scruffy dead man except that his mother had probably loved him once, so I commemorated his shade to her. Then I took his stale flatbread and his good sandals and the knife that I had wedged into him and went on my way.
Killing wasn’t easier the second time, even though I’d had cause that no one would dispute. The act was so final. Even now, I cannot look back with anything but sorrow. Nothing was left for forgiveness or vengeance when a person has breathed their last. Papa had been just as dead, but his body had not yet received the message.
I moved on, with no purpose except the habit of walking. Even my bells were forgotten. Eventually, I came to travel three days with a trio of old women who did not say a word for most of that time. They wore pale robes and carried wilted lilies, in honor of the goddess whom I would soon come to serve. They shuffled slowly, but they had food and seemed to know the increasingly busy road. Best of all, they did not try to drive me away when I fell in with them. A few hours later, I flashed my knife at a young man who looked too closely at us. The oldest of the women smiled at me for that. I had no idea then that she was one of the most accomplished killers in this land.
We crested a rise the afternoon of the third day, and there was Kalimpura. It did not look like a city to me. I was used to Copper Downs, first as a place of close walls and distant noises, then as rooftops and sewers, and finally in my last days there, a city of pale stone and slate and copper, squared lines, and narrow windows.
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.