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  A Bait of Dreams

  Jo Clayton

  FIRST SUMMER’S TALE

  A Bait of Dreams

  As Gleia hurried along the uneven planks of the walkway, pattering around the bodies of sleeping drunks, slipping past workmen and market women, Horli’s red rim bathed the street in blood-red light, painting a film of charm over the façades of the sagging buildings.

  She glanced up repeatedly, fearing to see the blue light of the second sun Hesh creeping into the sky. Late. Her breath came raggedly as she tried to move faster. She knocked against people in the crowded street, drawing curses after her.

  Late. Nothing had gone right this morning. When Horli’s light had crept through the holes in her torn shade and touched her face, one look at the clock sent her into a panic, kicking the covers frantically aside, tearing her nightgown over her head. No time to eat. No time to discipline her wild hair. She dragged a comb through the worst of the tangles as she splashed water into a basin. No time to straighten the mess in the room. She slapped water on her face, gasping at the icy sting.

  Rush. Grab up the rent money. Snatch open the wardrobe door and pull out the first cafta that came to hand. Slip feet into sandals. A strap breaks. With half-swallowed curse, dig out the old sandals with soles worn to paper thinness. Rush. Drop the key chain around her neck. Hip strikes a chair, knocking it over. Ah! No time to pick it up. Plunge from the room, pausing only to make sure the lock catches. Even in her feverish hurry she could feel nausea at the thought of old Miggela’s fat greasy fingers prodding through her things again.

  Clatter down the stairs. Down the creaking groaning spiral, fourth floor to ground floor. Nod the obligatory greeting to the blunt-snouted landlady who came out from her nest where she sat in ambush day and night.

  The sharp salty breeze whipped through the dingy side street, surrounding her with its burden of fish, tar, exotic spices, and the sour stench from the scavengers’ piles of scrap and garbage. The smells slid by unnoticed as she ran down the wooden walk, her footsteps playing a nervous tattoo on the planks. As she turned onto the larger main street, she glanced up again. Hesh still hadn’t joined Horli in the sky. Thank the Madar. Still a little time left. She could get to the shop before Hesh-rise.

  Her foot came down hard on a round object. It rolled backward, throwing her. She staggered. Her arms flung wildly out, then she fell forward onto the planks, her palms tearing as she tried to break her fall, her knees tearing even through the coarse cloth of her cafta.

  For a minute, she stayed on hands and knees, ignoring the curious eyes of the workers flowing past her. Several stopped to ask if she was hurt. But she shook her head, her dark brown hair hanging about her face, hiding it from them. They shrugged, then went on, leaving her to recover by herself.

  Still on her knees, she straightened her body and examined her palms. The skin was broken and abraded. Already she could feel her hands stiffening. She brushed the grit off, wincing at the pain. Then she looked around to find the thing that had brought her down. A crystal pebble was caught in one of the wider cracks between the planks. Shaped like an egg, it was just big enough to fit in the palm of her hand. “A Ranga Eye,” she whispered.

  Blue Hesh slid over the edge of the roof above her, reflecting in the crystal. Gleia looked cautiously around, then thrust the Eye into her pocket and jumped to her feet, wincing at the pain that stabbed up from her battered knees. Limping, she hurried on toward the center of the city.

  “You’re late.” Habbiba came fluttering through the lines of bent backs, her tiny hands thrusting out of the sleeves of her elegant black velvet cafta like small pale animals. Her dark eyes darted from side to side, scanning the girls as she moved.

  Gleia sucked in a breath, then lowered her head submissively. She knew better than to try to excuse herself.

  Habbiba stopped in front of her, moving her hands constantly over herself, patting her hair, stroking her throat, touching her mouth with small feathery pats. “Well?”

  Gleia stretched out her hands, showing the lacerated palms. “I fell.”

  Habbiba shuddered. “Go wash.” She flicked a hand at the wall clock. “You’ll make up the time by working through lunch.”

  Gleia bit her lip. She could feel the emptiness groaning inside her and a buzzing in her head, a tremble in her knees. She wanted to protest but didn’t dare.

  “Go. Go.” Habbiba fluttered hands at her. “Don’t touch the wedding cafta with those filthy hands and don’t waste more time.”

  As Gleia went into the dark noisome washroom, she heard the soft voice lashing first one then another. She made a face and muttered, “Bitch.” The falling curtain muted the poisonous tongue.

  Hastily Gleia scrubbed at her hands, ignoring the sting of the coarse soap. She dried them on the towel, the only clean thing in the room. Clean because a filthy towel might lead to filthy hands which could damage the fine materials the girls worked on. Not for the workers, nothing ever done for the workers. She felt the crystal bang against her thigh as she turned to move out, felt a brief flare of excitement, but there was no time and she forgot it immediately.

  She slid into her place and took up her work, settling the candles so the light fell more strongly on the cloth. White on white, a delicate pattern of fantasy flowers and birds.

  Habbiba’s shadow fell over the work. “Hands.”

  Gleia held out her hands. Small thumbs pressed hard on the drying wounds.

  “Good. No blood.” Habbiba’s hand flew to the shimmering white material protected from dust and wear by a sheath of coarse unbleached muslin. “Slow.” A finger jabbed at the incomplete sections, flicking over the pricked-out design. “I must have it done by tomorrow. A two-drach fine for each hour you take over that.” Her shadow moved off as she darted away to scold one of the girls who was letting her candle gutter.

  Gleia caught her breath, a hard frustration squeezing her in the middle. Tomorrow? Sinking her teeth in her lower lip, she blinked back tears. She’d been counting on the money Habbiba had promised her for this work. Twenty-five oboli. Enough to finish off the sum she needed to buy her bond, even to pay the bribes and leave a little over to live on. Now … She looked around the cavernous room with the misty small lights flickering over bent heads. She stiffened. Damn her, she thought. I’ll finish this on time if it kills me.

  Resolutely she banished all distraction and bent over the work, her stiffened fingers slowing her until the exercise warmed them to their usual suppleness.

  As the band of embroidery crept along the front panels of the cafta, Gleia felt hungry, her stomach paining almost as if she were poisoned, but that went away after a while.

  While she sewed, her mind began to drift though her eyes clung tenaciously to the design. In a painful reverie, she relived brief images of her life, tracking the thread of events that had led her to this place at this moment.…

  First memories. Pain and fear. Dim images of adult faces. A woman’s arms clinging to her, then falling away. A man, face blurred, unrecognizable, shouting angrily, then in pain, then not at all. Then a string of faces that came and went like beads falling from a cheap necklace. Then … digging in garbage piles outside kitchen doors, fighting the scavengers—small shaggy creatures with filthy hands and furtive eyes—for scraps of half-rotten vegetables or bones with a shred of meat left on them.

  Habbiba came back, jerked the work from her hands and examined it closely. “Sloppy,” she grunted. She held the work so long Gleia clenched her hands into fists, biting her lip till blood came to hold back the protest that would spoil all her chances of fini
shing the cafta on time.

  A smile curled Habbiba’s small tight mouth into a wrinkled curve, then Habbiba thrust the material back at her. “Take more care, bonder, or I’ll have you rip the whole out.”

  Gleia watched her move on. For a minute she couldn’t unclench her fingers. She wants me to go overtime. She wants to make me beg. Damn her damn her damn.…

  After a minute she took up the work again, driving the needle through the fabric with a vicious energy that abated after a while as the soothing spell of the work took over. Once again she fell into the swift loose rhythm that freed her mind to think of other things.

  Begging in the streets, running with packs of other abandoned children, sleeping in abandoned houses, or old empty warehouses, barely escaping with her life from a fire that took twenty other children, wandering the streets, driven by cold back into the houses where the only heat was the body heat of the children sleeping in piles where some on the outside froze and some on the inside smothered, children dying in terrible numbers in the winter, only the toughest surviving.

  Being beaten and hurt until she grew old enough to fight, learning to leap immediately into all-out attack whenever she had to fight, no matter what the cause, until the bigger children let her alone since it wasn’t worth expending so much of their own meager energy to defeat her.

  Being casually raped by a drunken sailor, then forgotten immediately as he staggered away, leaving her bloody and crying furiously on the cobblestones, not wholly sure of what had happened to her, but recognizing the violation of her person and vowing it would not happen again, screaming she would kill him kill him.…

  Running in a gang after that, being forced to submit to Abbrah, the leader, bully-stupid but too strong for her, taking a perverse pride in being chosen, never liking it, realizing about that time the vulnerability of male pride and the superiority of male muscle.

  Learning to steal, driven to stealing by Abbrah, stealing from a merchant’s warehouse, caught, branded, bound into service with Habbiba.

  Scrubbed up and forced to learn … the lessons, oh the interminable lessons, shadowed impersonal faces bending over her, voices, hushed and insistent, beating at her.…

  She started. A cowled figure moved soundlessly past, the coarse cloth of his robe slapping against her ankles. She watched the Madarman halt beside Habbiba and begin talking. Habbiba nodded and the two figures moved out of the room, both silent, both trailing huge black shadows that spread depressingly over the sewing girls. What’s that about, she wondered. Madarman sucking about.…

  Cowled figures, voices demanding, learn or be beaten, memorize and repeat, mechanical rote learning, paying no attention to what is learned, cram the songs, the histories, the Madarchants into the unwilling little heads. Repeat. Repeat. Work all morning, then, when her body rebelled, when she yearned for the freedom of the streets with a passion that swamped even her continual hunger to know, set to school by order of the Madarmen to save her pitiful soul.

  History in chant. Jaydugar, the testing ground of the gods. The Madar’s white hands reached among the stars and plucked their fruit, the souls that needed testing, catmen and mermen, caravanner and hunter, scavenger and parsi, plucked wriggling from their home trees and dropped naked on the testing ground. Chant of the Coming. I take you from the nest that makes you weak and blind. I take from you your metal slaves. I take from you your far-seeing eyes. I take from you the wings that sail you star to star. I purify you. I give you your hands. I promise you cleverness and time. Out of nothing you will build new wings.

  New wings. Gleia snorted. Several girls turned to look at her, their faces disapproving, she smiled blankly at them and they settled back to work. She could hear the furtive whispers hissing between them but ignored these. Her needle whispered through sheer white material, popping in and out with smooth skill. She sniffed scornfully at the other girls’ refusal to accept her into their community.

  New wings. She frowned down as she looped the thread in a six-petalled flower and whipped the loops in place. It might make an interesting design … new wings … the stars … she drove the needle through the material in a series of dandelion-bloom crosses. Did we all come here from other worlds? How? Her frown deepened. The Madar … that was nonsense. Wasn’t it?

  The Madarman came down the aisle and stopped beside her. He held out his hand. Reluctantly Gleia set the needle into the material and gave him her work, biting her lip as she saw the dark crescents of dirt under his fingernails. She held her breath as he brought the cloth up close to rheumy eyes.

  “Good,” he grunted. He thrust the cloth back at her and stumped off to rejoin Habbiba. Gleia took a minute to stretch her cramped limbs and straighten her legs as she watched Habbiba usher him out. Looks like I’m up for a new commission, she thought. She looked over the line of bent backs, feeling a fierce superiority to those giggling idiots raised secure in homes with fathers and mothers to protect them. Here they are anyway, doing the same work for a lot less pay than I’m getting. Me. Gleia. The despised bonder. The marked thief. She wriggled her fingers to work some of the cramp out of them, touched the brand on her cheek. Then she sighed and went back to the design. Her thoughts drifted back to her life.

  Remembering

  Being forced to learn rough sewing, then embroidery, taking a timid pride in a growing skill, taking a growing pride in making designs that she soon recognized to be superior to any others created in Habbiba’s establishment.

  Learning she could buy herself free of the bond if she could ever find or save enough money. Fifty oboli for the bond. Fifty oboli for the bribes. More to keep herself while she hunted for work. Joy and despair. And joy again.…

  Demanding and getting special pay for special projects. Her work brought fancy sums to Habbiba’s greedy fingers and more—a reputation for the unique that brought her custom she couldn’t have touched before. The old bitch tried to beat her into working, but Gleia had learned too well how to endure. She was stubborn enough to resist punishment and to persist in her demands, sitting resolutely idle through starvings and whippings and threats until she won her point.

  Gleia jabbed the needle through the cloth. It glanced off a fingernail, coming close to pricking her finger and drawing blood. She leaned back, breathing fast, trying to calm herself. A drop of blood marring the white was all she needed. Not now. Not so close to winning. She couldn’t stand another month of this slavery. She fingered the mark on her cheek and knew they’d throw her into permanent slavery as an incorrigible felon if she tried to run away. If they caught her. Which they would.

  Sometime later Habbiba made her last round, inspecting the day’s work. She stopped beside Gleia and picked up the cloth, running the unworked length of design through her plump white fingers. “Fah! too slow. And there.” She jabbed a forefinger at the last sections of work. “You did finer work when you were learning. Tomorrow you come in one hour early. Abbosine will be told to let you in.” She pinched the material between her fingers “Take out that last work to here.” She thrust the strip of embroidery into Gleia’s face and indicated a spot about two palms’ width above the last stitches. “I won’t tolerate such miserable cobbling going out under my name.”

  Gleia closed her eyes. Her hands clenched into fists. She wanted to smash the old woman in the face, to smash—smash—smash that little weasel face into bloody ruin, then wipe the ruin on that damn cafta. But she doubted whether she could stand without tumbling over, so she managed to keep her head down and her mouth shut. When the old woman went off to scold someone else, she sat still, hands fisted in her lap.

  Habbiba’s scolding voice faded as she left the room. The other girls moved about, chatting cautiously, eyes turning slyly about, watching out for the sudden return of their employer. When they had all trickled out, bunched into laughing clusters of workfriends, Gleia forced herself onto her feet.

  The world swung. She grabbed at the sewing stand and held on tight until the room steadied around her. With neat
economical movements she folded her work and put it in the box, then she walked through the rows of silent tables, a fragile glass person that the slightest shock would crack into a thousand fragments.

  Outside, the darkening twilight threw a veil of red over the crowded streets, blurring covered carts with screeching wheels into horsemen riding past in dark solid groups into single riders gawking at the city sights into throngs of people pushing along the wooden walkways. She hummed the Madarchant of the peoples. Chilkaman catman fishman hunter, parsi plainsman desert fox herder, firssi mountainman caravanner hawkster.… In spite of her fatigue she sucked in a deep breath and watched furtively the fascinating variety of peoples flowing past her. Chilka catmen from the plains with their hairy faces, flat noses and double eyelids, the inner transparent one retracted into the damp tissue folds around their bulging slit-pupilled eyes. Caravanners, small and quick, pale faced. Mountain hunters, far from their heights with dark gold skin and brown hair bleached almost white at the tips, leading horses loaded with fur bales.

  A breath of salt air, cool and fresh as the sea itself, stung her nose. A flash of opaline emerald. Impression of scaled flesh flowing liquidly past. A seaborn. Ignoring the irritated protests of the other pedestrians she turned and stared after the slim amphibian walking with the characteristic quick clumsy grace of the sea folk. She didn’t recognize him. Disappointed, she edged to the wall and stumbled tiredly through the crowd thinking about the only friend she’d ever had, a slim green boy … so long ago … so long.…

  She walked slowly into the dingy front hall of the boarding house, putting each foot down with stiff care, wondering how she was going to get up all those damn creaking stairs.

  “Gleyah ’spinah.” The hoarse breathy voice brought her to a careful halt. She inched her head around, feeling that her burning eyes would roll from her head if she moved too quickly.

  “Rent.” Miggela held out a short stubby hand.