I SCREAMED. OUBLIETTE PUT ALL HER WEIGHT on the stamp and it slogged into my armpit, mashing skin and bone and blood together. It did not sever on the first try, and I whimpered, I groaned like a woman in labor as she l
oaded up the stamp and brought it down again. I think I may have fainted away, for I remember waking to her tightening a strip of one of the corpses’ dresses around my stump. She held the tattered shoulder to the hottest parts of the machine, which glowed a baleful red, and I probably screamed again. It was a wonder we were not caught—but then, the children often cried out in their sleep, often screamed, often wept. Perhaps I should have let Oubliette do it after all. She would not have screamed.
I remember staring at the ruined arm, which was once part of me, once my own, and would be no more. Those were my fingers, fingers that had gripped pens and bucket handles, cow teats and apple cores. Those were the lines on my palm, that foretold who knew what future. It was my body we put through the Mint, laboriously, my blood we smelled as it wet the innards of the machine, as we turned the gears and moved the pistons with her two hands and my one. It was my body I heard crunched under the final stamps, and my body I saw emerge from the mouth end of the machine’s arc, the mouth which had been shaped into a tooth-wight’s grin.
Twelve coins, pale and round, of clean, gleaming bone. All we had in the world, out of my own flesh, like a wet fruit cut out of its skin.
During the midday meal, we found Vhummim watching one of the girls devour translucent tourmalines as though they were the first cherries of summer. She stroked her neck. She stroked her diamond belly beneath her rags. We smeared our best smiles on our faces and called her to us.
She did not seem to notice the arm—so many of us were mangled there, another injury was no foreign thing.
“We want to leave, Vhummim,” Oubliette said firmly.
“I am certain that you do, little one. All is not as it was, when Marrow was the center of the world and no man wished to leave it before his pockets were full of lapis and his arms full of women. But you must know I cannot help you.”
“We do not want your help,” my friend hissed. “We are citizens of Marrow now. We have paid our taxes, we do our civic duty. And we have the right to trade, just as anyone.”
Vhummim cocked her head, her bluish hair falling into her face like waxen icicles. “You have no money to spend, precious ones. No dhheiba. What could you possibly buy with air?”
Oubliette drew out our purse. I was still half faint and ashen; I did not trust myself to handle the coins without dropping the whole lot to the rubbish-floor. One by one, she fed the coins into her palm until it was piled high, and held it out—six, only six coins in her shaking hand, to buy our lives back. The grain merchant’s daughter knew to hold something in reserve, in case the ghost drove up the price. Vhummim licked her lips with a colorless tongue.
“That is not enough to buy your ruby breakfast,” she said, but she did not look away. She and Oubliette locked their gazes for a long time, a kind of silent bartering I could not enter. Finally, the foreman spoke, her glassy eyes drooping in her skull.
“In the days when we ate all possible things, the rarest transactions were the most prized, even if they were no more than a twig traded for a feather—if the seller of the twig were a man with one eye, and the seller of the feather a woman with a beard, it was called a success. No worker has ever made this offer, and I will accept it, in the name of the old Asaad. But you will leave under the vault of night, and I will boast of my trade only after you have long gone, lest it be judged less rare than I think, and I am punished.”
We agreed, and she took the coins in her long, spidery fingers, closing them over the bone reverently, with a strangely kittenish moan of pleasure.
“It was like this,” she murmured, “before, in the time when all possible things were bought and traded, and the silk was high and red over the Asaad. The feel of economy was like this, light and thick and sweet. I remember it, I tasted it long after I could taste nothing else, the memory of Marrow the lost, which was called Shadukiam in days now dead and cold.”
She closed her eyes and looked up through the ragged roof, her gray throat ululating in grief and longing.
THE TALE
OF THE
CROSSING,
CONTINUED
A WIND HAD PICKED UP ACROSS THE WATER. THE surface was dull and flat, gray as a maiden’s eye, and moving quickly, wrinkles forming and traveling around the little ferry.
“I suppose Marrow seemed a fit name, considering their new vocation, better than their old one, at any rate,” Seven mused.
Idyll chuckled and shifted under his cloak. He stroked the hunch of his back with one hand thoughtfully. “Shadukiam was a place of wonder once, boy—those roses blowing through your door once covered the whole place in a dome of flowers. There were silver towers, and diamond turrets. There were women in purple and men in scarlet. It smelled of algae and gold. Do not speak of what you do not know.”
“I know enough of that stinking, windblown hole!” Seven said hotly, his breath fogging in the icy air.
“Because you know a corpse does not mean you knew the man.”
They lapsed into a woolen silence. Seven pulled up his collar around his face with one awkward hand and scowled into the breezes whipping his cheeks. He could see the clouds bunch and knot in the northern sky, not dark, as rainclouds ought to be, but pale. They were simply gathering, a great snarl of white, like cotton wound sloppily round a spindle.
“The storm is coming,” Idyll said quietly. “She’s early today. I don’t know if we’ll make land by the time she blows through.”
“I have weathered storms before, old man.”
“No doubt, a brave thing like you. But lake storms are a breed apart.”
“I am brave,” Seven grumbled. “If I were not brave, I would not have come here. I would have drunk steaming cider by a hearth instead of this, built a house, had children. I am going to save her. She saved me. We kept saving each other, even after the Mint. What else can I do?”