Chapter Twenty-six
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The ship had stopped moving!
Even before she opened her eyes she could smell, beyond the stench of feces, urine, blood, vomit, the perfume in the air, the flowers. She was sure she was dead.
“Home!” she called out, “we are home!”
“Home!” the word passed among them.
Others began to weep, some shaking those who had not yet awakened, only to discover that they would never awake, not in this world.
They had returned home! The home shores, the home beaches, the forests of home! This hope became only the first cruelties of their disembarkation in the New World.
Sailors descended the ship’s stairs, using whip-handles to goad the people onto the deck. Yes, warm breezes carried the scent of flowers and land lay no more than a body’s length away. Land—but not homeland. The sky above seemed a different shade of blue. Not home, not home! Women bleated like sacrificial lambs while men muttered to other men. The sound grew louder, like the rumbling of running animals on a plain. Sailors, and rough men who boarded from the shore, rushed among them, waving stanchions and threatening to beat them down. Slowly the muttering subsided as the news dawned on them that they were further from home than ever before.
Lyaa could hardly stand as she moved along with the herd of people to descend the gangplank. Seeing someone crumple and fall into the water, she held tightly to the rope railing, assembling with the others on the wooden pier. Flowers—and in the distance trees she had not seen before, with broad leaves, flowering. She breathed deeply, desperate to rid her nostrils of the awful stench of the ship. The sun came up behind her. Her legs trembled so they could scarcely hold her. How many days and nights? How many storms? How many bodies?
Shouts! Thunder of voices!
Pale-skinned men roughly dressed now herded them into a fenced-in place near the water and others came carrying buckets and doused them with cold water, again and again. A white-haired pale-skin wearing a mask over his eyes walked among them, daubing at his nose with a cloth. Now and then he pointed to a person, sometimes a man, but mostly women, and others came to lead them from the compound.
Lyaa enjoyed the dousing, and hoped for more. To rid herself of the stink of their long voyage was the only thing that she truly wished for, at least for the moment. And food! Yes, yes! When more pale-skins carried in barrels of soup and baskets piled with bread she elbowed her way past the frailer captives to lower herself to her knees and feast on the thin mixture.
Some people pulled themselves away from the barrels and collapsed onto the pier. Others ate, and then vomited, and ate again. And vomited. She herself ate until her belly ached, and then she paused for a breath or two, and ate again. More pale-skins pushed their way into the crowded pen, shouting in that language Lyaa could not understand.
What did it matter to her? At any moment she could shake loose these leg-manacles and fly out of the compound, soaring high above whatever land this new place happened to be. Nothing else mattered to her. Her freedom lay just outside the reach of her hand, just beyond the next cloud. She could fly away, and so she decided that she would soon make her departure.
At the edge of the fence she stared out at the countryside, and the bright off-white sky where beneath the ocean surged, she knew, she knew. Standing on tiptoe she thrust her mind into the air. As she was about to leap from the ground vicious cramps doubled her over and she sank to her knees, vomiting, vomiting, vomiting over herself, over the ground.
A large dousing of water shocked her awake. She lay on the ground, in the middle of a long row of bodies. Without the sun holding high in the sky she would have thought she had been shot back to the hold of the ship. People moaned, retched, tried to roll over on their bellies, but found themselves constricted by the manacles and chains. Even as she tried to lie still the wrenching and tugging along the line pulled her this way and that.
Eventually calm settled over them and the tall pale-skinned man with the eye-mask walked among them, with two short and ugly men following.
The tall man—he seemed older than the others—pointed and said some words, and the ugly men unlocked manacles and detached people from the line, some of them going in one place off to the side, some to another as the tall man directed. Some people shouted, others struggled. The two uglies, using stanchions, beat down the ones who tried to resist and let them lie where they fell. When the tall man came to Lyaa he paused, and reached down to touch a finger to her cheek and then to her belly. Ah, she decided, a medicine man! And yes, he pointed, said more words, and the two uglies unlocked her and led her off to one side, with the group of people who appeared to be slightly fatter and more steady than the other group.
A thick-armed man as black as the sky without a moon said to his companions in this group that he understood what the pale-skins had said.
“Yes? Yes?” People clamored to hear. “How do you understand them?”
“On the ship, I listened, I learned,” he said.
“And what do you know now?”
“We are good,” he said. “They mean we are going to live, we are healthy as can be after the ship.”
“I am sick,” Lyaa said.
The man clucked at her.
“You are not sick. I heard what he said. You are carrying a child. They like that.”
“I am carrying a child?”
“You did not know?”
“I did not.”
“He said it was true.”
“Who said it?”
“The shaman, the tall one.”
Lyaa smiled to herself, and touched her belly lightly with her fingers.
“This is not just a child,” she said.
The old man gave her an inquiring look.
“What else could it be?” he said.
“The goddess,” she said. “My mother was, and her mother before her, and before all of them they were, and this new one, she will be, too.”
The old man paused, as if he were considering something to say, and what a luxury that was, after all the horrors of the journey they had endured. But a pale-skin holding a stick pointed it at him and beckoned for him to follow, and he left Lyaa there, pondering her new condition.
At least, though confused, she remained alive. Over the next days and weeks as she walked about the small pen where the pale-skins had put them, walls all around but the sun shining over head and plenty of birds flying, she felt in her heart that she had, that all of them had, been abandoned. Once she might have thought of herself as one of those birds about to fly, but now, weighed down with grief and homesickness and the literal weight of her growing belly, she heard the birds laugh at her, stupid, earthbound girl. But the child she was carrying? She had no doubts. It was not another creature to be bought and sold—it would be able to fly.
During the early morning, nearly every day of her stay in this pen, she could hear the moans and shrieks as the uglies came to cart away the sick and dying, while Lyaa and her group stayed strong. She knew for a fact—the tall dark man reported it to them—that the pale-skins gave them more food than the sickly ones. And after a few days the sickly ones would sink even further into their illnesses, and the uglies would come to remove them from the pen.
Taking them where?
She did not know.
“I think they put them in the ground,” the tall dark man said. “They are dying here, and will be dead within a few hours. That is why they take them out of here.”
That must be true. As her group grew stronger, the number of the sickly weakened, and, according to the tall black man, something was going to take place soon—he heard the uglies talking about it, something new soon.
A few mornings later, with the sun and the laughing birds high overhead, the medicine man came around and looked each of them over, nodding, making musical sounds with his lips.
“What?” Lyaa said.
“We are ready,” the tall black man said.
Lyaa shook her head. She took a deep breath and felt the holy infant turn inside her belly.
“Ready for what?” she said.