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This month we begin a new, two-part story set in Mal Nassrin. Fetish brings a look at the city through the eyes of Anikka, a young woman apprenticed to one of the city's healers. Missed any of our earlier stories? See our complete list of serials here. Fetish
By Sonja Littell-Trotter
Chapter 1
Autumn light is always slanting light, when not even the noonday sun can hold shade perfectly beneath it. Somehow the shadows always slip away, sideways. It was a dusty saffron afternoon, when the weather should have cooled with the approach of winter, but had not. Anikka stood in the doorway of a house not her own and listened to the sound of women weeping.
The boy was dying. That was all. The women had waited too long, cared too little, or been too poor, none of which mattered now. Anikka only half-listened to the women's lament, though. Her new shoes pinched her feet and she was absorbed in trying, unobtrusively, to flex first one foot, then the other. Nevertheless, when her mentor spoke, all thoughts of grieving women and cramped feet fled as she lifted her head trying to see what he wanted before he named it. Catching her eye, he gestured curtly to the bowl that sat by the boy's head, and then wordlessly turned his attention back to the women.
The priest, Gideon Mather, stood with arms crossed at the foot of the bedroll where a young boy lay. He had donned Oron's Hands, symbolic of Oron's work, the wide black bands wrapped once around the palm and twice around the wrists, their ends tucked precisely into the small pulse-hollow where the wrist joined the hand. Master Gideon had bands made of heavy silk proper to his rank and experience; hers were simple dyed linen. Moisture made the dye run and stain her hands, but she wrapped her wrists anyway. The first was easy--her left hand was smart, after all--but she fumbled the wraps with her dumb hand and bowed her slight body down to hide her clumsy fingers from Gideon's sharp eyes.
While the women carried on, Anikka dipped a small cloth in the bowl of water and wrung out the excess. She wiped the boy's brow lightly. On his narrow face the bones stood out, sharp and sad. She whispered the first of the prayers for the dying softly, hoping the child would hear and be comforted. Gideon would speak them all later. Anikka frowned as she lifted the boy's slight hand and ran the cloth over his palm and up his arms; they should have brought him to the temple. Two voices were not a proper chorus for the ears of the gods. Not that she would be expected or even allowed to join--this time, anyway.
Gideon led the family away as they began another round of wailing, now over coin, and Anikka wrinkled her nose with distaste. The two women, she knew, were of the newly poor. A widow and her sister, both wool-merchant wives, had once shared a business that spanned within and without the city. Their small homestead without had foundered under drought, and bad luck had taken their shop within along with it. She did not know where the remaining husband was--off doing whatever men did when they were avoiding their women, she supposed.
Anikka rinsed the cloth again and absently patted the child's hand. The blanket tucked around him was bright and the weave tightly elaborate, not unexpected for sheep-folk. The family was clearly used to lodgings better than this bare house with its plain plaster walls. But kneeling on the floor strewn with herbs and rushes, Anikka almost felt at home. She had been bred far outside the city and born on the march, but many of her memories were of rooms like this, simple and dusty. The clay bowl before her was glazed a creamy white and stenciled with luster-paint that shone warmly golden. As Anikka turned the bowl to admire the regularity of the design, she saw a small metal brooch on the floor. The trinket had been half-hidden by the curve of the bowl, and gazing at it, Anikka couldn't quite tell what it was.
It was a small thing, easily missed, no bigger than the pad of her thumb, and its shape as anonymous as forms in a cloud. Anikka tilted her head down, glancing at Gideon from the corner of her eye. The women were appealing to him, but he looked unmoved by whatever they were saying, and the boy… well, the boy was dying. Her chest tightened, and she could feel her breath tremble in her throat as desire for the thing welled up inside her, filling her body like spring rain in a cistern. Her fingers shook as she steeled herself to act, and before she could even think why she wanted it, she reached out and took the little brooch, slipping it into the deep pocket of her cassock.
She glanced back. The conversation was continuing oblivious to her actions, and she grinned with a giddy flood of relief. She dipped the cloth in the water, and resumed her ministrations. He was such a young child; she hoped his shadow would be kind. Surely, he could have done little wrong with his small life.
Gideon's hand on her shoulder jarred her out of her musings, and she straightened. She turned to scan his face, terrified for a moment that he'd seen what she'd done, but he said nothing. Gideon was a good man, a good priest, distant and often aloof, somewhat cold, but never quite unkind. Anikka knew that if he'd been sent sooner, if the women had wasted no time, that he could have spared the boy.
"Anikka," he said, his usual clipped speech slowing as he addressed her, "I need you to return to the temple and bring Brother Jyen. Hurry now."
"Y-yes, sir," Anikka said, her face twisting as her foolish tongue struggled with even these simple words. This was the real reason she could not lift her voice in prayer, she knew. Her fool mouth and her dumb hands. She rose, bent her knee respectfully to her master, and dashed from the room, her heavy robes pulling wavy lines on the dirty floor.
In the dark hall, she touched the smooth line of the brooch, the cool metal warming already in her pocket as the hard point of the pin pricked her thumb. It was hers now, whatever it was.
Anikka quit the house and hurried through the small group of neighbors lingering in the common courtyard. Someone called a question after her, but she ignored it and kept her head down and her eyes on where her feet were going. The cobbles under her shoes were worn, seeming to yearn to twist an incautious ankle in their wide and toothless gaps. Outside of the gate she paused. Mal Nassrin was large, sprawling and congested, but no city is truly large at street level. From the ground, it was just a series of alleys, a collection of shops, and a temple here and there. From the inside, it was just home. Gideon had led her down the wide boulevards and broad streets of main thoroughfares, and Anikka had followed easily enough before. Now she was less sure of that route. Given no specific direction, she hurried right, making her way to Tanglebone Row, a short curving street of butcher shops and meat markets that skirted the bare edge of the wide Merchant Square.
Halfway along the street, she stopped in the doorway of the tanner shop, closed at this hour, and from her pocket took the trinket. At first, she thought it was meant to be a wee woolly lamb, the brushed metal coils as fine as elf-hair, but as she turned it in her hands, her impression changed. Maybe it was the wind-blown mane of a wild Mashiz desert horse, or a lucky tangle of delicate serpents. A serpent, yes, changing its skin and fortune whenever it needed. Anikka smiled crookedly. How she wished she could change her skin, be a proper prentice to brilliant Gideon!
Surely, he had not seen what she did. He would have chastised her, she knew, and then good and wise Gideon would not allow her to serve him anymore. She closed her eyes at the shame of it, whispering penitence for the coil of snakes in her hand.
A noise from behind startled her, and she glanced back, jumping aside as she saw the door hanging open. She stood and stared, quite sure it had been shut just a moment ago. The room inside looked dusty and unused.
"H-hello?" Anikka said into the twilight of the shuttered room. "I'm sorry t-to be in the way, I... I was just resting a moment here." There was no answer, and she backed away. Someone was inside, she knew. Someone who wasn't speaking. She could feel their unseen eyes on her.
"What're you doing, miss?" The voice was gruff and Anikka nearly tripped trying to avoid stepping into a frowning man who regarded her with flat suspicion.
"I w-was just resting a moment, sir," Anikka said." I d-didn't know..."
"Thieving most likely," the man said, "I've seen you afore, have I not? Pokin' around and pawin' at things, never payin' and here you are now. Eyein' the old man's store, eh?"
"N-no, sir," Anikka said. "My m-master sent me t-to...," she stammered helplessly under his unfriendly eyes and tried to edge away from both the man and the doorway.
"Get on, then," the man said, "or your master will have your hide." He grinned suddenly, baring yellow teeth at her in a nasty leer.
"Y-yes..." Anikka hated to turn her back to him, but he was right. Gideon was depending on her. She scrambled away, past the fowler's shop with its brace of swinging birds plucked and ready for the pot. At the far end of the street, she looked back and saw the man still watching her, head tilted back to see her over the crowd.
He had said he'd seen her, but he couldn't have. Could he? She was good; she obeyed the law and her master's unspoken words. There was nothing she had that she didn't need. The weight in her pocket swung with her stride, and she nodded absently. She'd never taken what she didn't need.
Past the Row, Anikka broke into a run, dodging through the crowd as she tried to make back the time she'd spent loitering. She stepped lightly, as the street here had more traffic. She wanted to avoid the beasts and their stale, which would spoil her new shoes. What she couldn't sidestep so easily was the conviction that she was being watched. Watched by something that did not mean her well.
She slid her hand into her pocket and squeezed her lucky brooch possessively. There was an eye on her, she was sure. An eye the color of a peach pit, but as smooth as a polished fingernail. There would be no white ringing that eye, and around it, skin the exact color of a dead tooth would stretch like a small gaping mouth. The pupil within would be a tiny black sun, unmoving and small. The eye would not blink. There were no lashes that would shade that terrible staring eye... Anikka stopped and shook her head, her shoulders moving in an unconscious shudder.
Folly, she told herself, childish folly and the day's dying boy. That was why she was taken by such fancy; there was nothing with a gaze upon her. And no one save Gideon cared what she was about. His was the only regard that could wound her, and then only if she managed to disappoint him.
She was lucky to have him as her mentor. Lucky to have anything, really. She had come to the city, how many years ago she couldn't say, with her newly widowed mother, Sabine. Sabine was a laundress and had followed Anikka's mercenary father on his tours. When he died, they had come to the nearest city. Anikka didn't exactly know where her mother was now; the routine of city life had not set well on her mother. Sabine had found a new pikeman and followed his company now, or so Anikka thought. Her finger found the seam at the top of her pocket, and she touched it absentmindedly, thinking of the lucky tangle within.
"No matter how many times you flip a coin, you have the same chance to get what you want every time," Sabine had told her once. "People forget that. They think that it adds up somewhere, that if you get enough of one side, eventually the coin owes you t'other. The coin don't owe you nothing, Nikka. Not a godsdamned thing."
"Not a godsdamned thing," Anikka repeated softly.
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