The Book of Crows Read online

  ‘Ah, so she’s finally decided to wake up! Well, damn me if this one doesn’t take as much beauty sleep as you, Silk! You need it more, of course.’

  ‘Get lost, Claws.’

  ‘Now, now, show some manners in front of our new colleague. You’ll have to forgive Silk – she’s always grumpy in the morning, though she ought to be able to take a joke. Now, are you going to come out and sit with us or do you just want to sulk all day?’

  Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I joined them on the cushions outside, grateful that, like the Empress, they spoke the language of the plains my father had taught me for trading and not the strange and garbled tongue of the bandits.

  The one who had spoken first was clearly in charge. She looked older than the others, with lines welling up under her narrow eyes, though I could see she had tried to hide this as best she could with some kind of yellowy paste that covered most of her cheeks. She had a round face and big dimples, with her dark hair plaited behind her. I had met enough travellers in the villages beside the desert to know that she must have come from the middle kingdom. She was also the heaviest of the lot, with a big chest and big hips, both of which were wrapped in a light robe. What impressed me most were her fingernails: they were almost the same length as her fingers, and had been filed down to a sharp point at the end. I quickly sat on my hands to hide my own nails that were bitten down to the quick.

  ‘I’m Claws,’ she said, and raised her fingers in front of me. ‘Yes, we’ve all been given these silly names. You get used to them. You’re Jade, right? The Empress told us. Wow, your eyes really are green! I thought she was winding us up.’

  ‘I knew she wasn’t lying. The arrival of someone new was foretold in the formation of the clouds yesterday,’ the girl to her left said. She was younger, with the milky white skin, long thin braids, big nose and high cheeks I’d heard were common among the wandering tribes in the west. I couldn’t help but stare at her. She was tall and slim, and my eyes were drawn to her plump pink lips, fixed into a pout.

  ‘Oh, you’ll learn to ignore Silk soon enough,’ Claws said with a nod of her head in the tall girl’s direction. ‘She likes to think she knows everything. You’ll find the only time we get a bit of peace and quiet round here is when her mouth is full!’

  Claws laughed at her own joke and Silk looked down at the floor, her cheeks turning red. I noticed the third girl, sitting off a little to the right, had not said anything. Her skin was so dark that at first I thought she had been burnt or painted. She was shorter and thinner than any of the rest of us, with straight black hair pouring down over her shoulders. Her nose was as long as winter, and her eyes were as dark as the inside of my new room. Claws caught me looking her over and smiled.

  ‘That’s Tiger. If you keep all your anger boiling up inside you’ll end up the same as her. Like the rest of us, she’s a long way from home now. The Empress says that’s why people keep coming here: we’ve got everything anyone could want. We girls stick together though, so if you’ve got a problem you just talk to me. Tall and Homely live on the other side, and before you ask, yes, they do the same thing as us. But we don’t talk to them much. Truth be told, those boys spend more time preening and making themselves pretty than the three of us put together. And you, where are you from?’

  I wasn’t sure what to say. ‘Near the desert,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Mmm hmm. Bandits, right? Silk got here the same way, her whole tribe broken up in some dawn raid. They’re bastards, aren’t they? Tiger, she was part of a caravan travelling through the southern mountains when they ran out of supplies. Some merchants found her wandering near a border outpost in one of the valleys south of here and they couldn’t believe their luck. She couldn’t believe hers either, poor thing. It’s one thing to lose your family and another to end up here.

  ‘I’ll let you in on a secret. My father was a general in the army. When I was little, we had ten servants in our house. Now look at me. The last spoils of a forgotten war.

  ‘Those are our stories, and if you’re lucky you won’t ever hear them again, because let me tell you there is nothing worse than thinking of what you once were or what you could have become if things had been different. You throw away those thoughts now, sweetie, or else you’ll end up broken into little pieces.’ She waggled a long nail at me.

  ‘Like Honey,’ Tiger muttered.

  ‘Watch it.’ Claws gave her a sharp look. ‘You trying to scare the girl? Huh? She’s only just got here. Forget about Honey – that silly girl brought it on herself. Now then,’ she said, turning back to me, ‘The Empress told us we had to get you looking nice today, but we can’t do that on an empty stomach. Let’s see what the cook’s made.’

  Claws took me by the hand and we trundled up the path towards the smaller enclave with Tiger and Silk dragging their feet behind us. Claws fluttered her eyes at the cook – a dark, unshaven man missing most of his teeth – and he sighed and began to ladle bubbling broth out from a large clay pot set in the centre of a stack of smoking wood. A misshapen bowl was set down in front of me, and I tried to identify the grey and yellow bits floating in the murky water. Claws and Silk raised the bowls to their mouths and began to slurp noisily. From the corner of my eye I saw Tiger’s nose wrinkle up as she watched the others, but when she noticed my gaze she quickly raised her own bowl and began to take small, bird-like sips. I lifted my own bowl. It was salty and as sour as a bowlful of tears, but I was hungry.

  When Claws had finished she thumped the bowl down and let out a loud, rumbling belch. She smiled. ‘You’ll always be sure of food in your belly here, sweetie. Remember that. Much better than starving. But be careful – if you act up or give the patrons reason to complain, then the Empress will make you go hungry for a couple of days. It happened to Silk when she first arrived. Refused to do what that fat men paid extra for. She got a thrashing too, on the back of her legs. You can still see the marks.’

  Once again I saw Silk blush. ‘He was a bastard. I should have read it in the clouds that day. Wanted me to act like I was no better than a dog.’

  ‘But you did it in the end, didn’t you?’ Claws smiled. For all her show of friendliness it wasn’t hard to see that she took a certain pleasure in the younger girl’s humiliation. ‘Everyone gets broken in, no matter how strong you think you are. Everyone surrenders to it in the end.’

  ‘What other choice is there?’ Tiger said, her dark eyes gleaming in the light.

  I didn’t like the way they were talking – truth be told, it made me feel nervous, so I tried to change the subject. ‘So when will I get to see the master?’

  Silk cocked her head. ‘The celestial master?’

  ‘Umm, no, the master of the house. The man in charge.’

  ‘There’s no master here. Only the Empress, though as you probably noticed, her name’s more of a joke than any of ours!’ Claws laughed.

  Silk joined in the laughter, but I was confused. If there was no man, then who looked after the money, who ordered the cook around, who made sure everything stayed right? I thought of my father, propped up under some old tree and slurring out endless orders as I cooked for him, and for a second I was glad I was here. Tiger spotted my confused expression and shook her head.

  ‘You really don’t know where you are, do you?’ Her voice was quiet and gentle. ‘There are men that come through every week. Or more. Our job is to please them. That’s the easy part. The difficult part is to pretend that you are pleased as well, that you are happy, that you enjoy your life here. Perhaps if you act really well, then after a while you will begin to fool yourself.’

  Claws snorted. ‘Life’s not that bad here. Some nights we have these huge dinners with drinking and music and dancing and everyone has a great time. You’ll see.’

  ‘And, none of us are here forever,’ Silk joined in. ‘Didn’t the Empress tell you? Once we pay off our debts – you know, the money she spent buying us, plus interest, as well as for food and our rooms here and everything �
� we’re free. She promised.’

  Tiger raised her eyebrows and I saw a bitter smile play about the corner of her mouth.

  ‘What? You don’t believe it?’ Claws said. ‘Well then, what about Lotus and Feather? You’ve heard the Empress talking about them. We even had a couple of old regulars that one time who asked after Feather. Don’t tell me you’re turning deaf now, Tiger?’

  ‘I’ve heard plenty of talk about them. But did you ever see them?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Claws snapped. ‘You know that was before my time. You know very well that Silk and I arrived together only two winters before you. Feather had just left, which was why the Empress bought the both of us.’

  Tiger said nothing. The cook looked at the four of us and shook his head wearily, before going back to tending the fire.

  We spent the rest of the day ‘doing something about my looks’, as Claws put it. Silk washed my hair in a bucket of scented water, and Tiger combed and knotted it into a long braid. They took some of Honey’s old robes and skirts and went about taking them in for me. Silk showed me how to make my eyes look bigger by dabbing coloured dusts around them, and Claws seemed to take a lot of pleasure in plucking out my split hairs with her long fingernails. As the three of them busied themselves transforming me, Silk kept up a monologue about the different patterns of the clouds above us, and what they each meant. She said they could tell us anything, if only we read them properly. Claws kept pulling faces as Silk spoke, but she never went as far as interrupting her. I was just glad they had stopped bickering. I liked listening to Silk. Where I saw boring lumps of fluffy white puttering across the sky, Silk saw arrows and faces and animals and bodies and coins and kings and swords and mountains and a hundred other things too. She said that the clouds were telling us that I would be happy in my new home. I smiled, but I knew she was making it up to help me feel better.

  At some point in the afternoon I realised that for all their introductions not a single one of them had asked me anything about myself, save for where I’d come from. That struck me as strange at first, but I soon understood. They didn’t want to know about the world outside, because hearing about it would only make them feel homesick too. And I think they didn’t want to upset me. But more than either of those reasons, I think they didn’t have to ask me. In this line of work you learn how to read a stranger’s secrets and desires pretty quickly. From a few glances at the way a man holds himself and the way he moves you can work out his whole life story. So the other girls didn’t really have to ask about my father, about the villages beside the desert, about the fourteen summers of my life before I was taken here. They knew all of it the first time they saw my face.

  We heard the little bell ringing from the Empress’s room.

  ‘Shit. Visitors?’ Silk said.

  Claws nodded. ‘I reckon. The cook said he saw a caravan in the distance this morning. I’ll go and see how many. You lot better get yourselves ready, and don’t be messing about.’

  Silk began hastily packing away her coloured dusts and then hurried to her room. Tiger stood up and put a hand on my arm. She leaned close.

  ‘It’ll hurt the first time, but don’t give them the pleasure of letting them know that.’

  I nodded. I didn’t dare ask any more questions, because I was beginning to work out the answers for myself and I desperately did not want my suspicions confirmed. I heard the clatter of hooves and caught sight of a group of dishevelled men laughing and hollering near the gate. I ran to our shared room and closed the door behind me, my heart thumping in my stomach, trying as hard as I could to stop myself from crying and smudging the delicate colours Silk had painted on my face.

  Tiger was right. That first night was the worst. I bit my lip till it bled, until I tasted my own blood in my mouth and I focused on the taste. I screwed up my eyes and wished I was back in that cage – no matter how bad it had smelt or how trapped I had been – because it was still better than this fighting in the dark. I may have been innocent, but I wasn’t dumb. I knew what he wanted, what he was expecting when he took me into one of the fancy guestrooms and shoved his clammy hand under my borrowed skirts. I’d seen the village boys leading a girl down towards the stream, and the big men dragging captive women into the dunes, and I knew the rumours, and I’d listened to the gossipy housewives complaining about their hungry men, and I’d heard the speech about how the world works from one of the friendly village women who helped me out when I first got the gift of blood. So I knew. But that didn’t make it any easier. The only thing I can say is it was all over pretty quickly and for that at least I was grateful.

  Tiger crept across from her straw bed to mine later that night, and she helped me clean up and stroked my hair, all without saying a word. I was grateful for that too.

  You know how if you work too much your hands get calluses and blisters and the skin grows so tough you really don’t feel much of anything anymore, even if you hold your fingers too near the fire or grip the plough a whole twelve hours? Well, the same happens with your heart. It toughens up; it gets hard and mangled in your gut. It takes ages of course, little by little, and you don’t even notice that it’s happened.

  Those first few moons went by in a sea of aches and nightmares and bruises and frayed nerves, and if you don’t mind I won’t dwell on it. In the beginning, I’d wake up every morning thinking I couldn’t bear another day, and I spent all my energy trying to figure out ways to escape. The other girls left me to it, knowing that those kinds of dreams are no more than smoke – welling up in your eyes until you’re blinded by tears one moment, then disappearing into the air the next. I knew from them that the Empress had contacts throughout the valley that would report back to her, and that however bad things were, if I tried to run and got caught everything would be much worse.

  I was surprised to find, after only six or seven moons, though, that even if I hadn’t quite got used to my new life, I could at least get through the day without crying. People are just like the lizards in the desert in that way, I reckon – whatever they lose, be it a leg or a tail or a future, they’ll still keep scurrying on. I learnt how to laugh at the men’s jokes, and how to disguise my yelps and cries as moans of pleasure. Claws and Silk taught me how to split myself in two, so that I was able to become someone else in the evenings without giving up the real me, the daytime me. They showed me how to fake the sweetest of smiles, how to act demure and innocent, how to serve and how to hold out for little gifts and extras from my customers without the Empress finding out. They even showed me how to clean up properly to avoid any little accidents.

  During the day we played with dice and told stories about our dreams, as long as they hadn’t been too scary or too realistic. We unknotted and combed and retied each other’s hair, and we swapped clothes and experimented with Silk’s coloured dusts. Claws even taught us how to speak the language of the middle kingdom, giving long-winded speeches and making us repeat everything she said under the pretence that we might one day be visited by travellers from her home country – but really I suspect it was because she couldn’t bear to lose that last thread that kept her tied to the distant past. The days passed like this, and I even found that after a few weeks of bad weather when no one had passed our way I would begin to hope that some customers would turn up, if only so we could have some music and dancing and half-decent food and something new to gossip and joke about.

  Mostly our customers were traders looking for something to do with their newly acquired goods. Although everyone knew that the Empress craved silver, we could be bartered for almost anything: buttons, reels of silk, dried fruit, liquor, jade, once even a donkey. They were mostly unkempt, unshaven men feeling homesick and sunburnt, and it didn’t take much to make them happy. After all, they’d usually been in the desert for at least a whole moon before they stopped by, unloaded the camels and let their slaves set up camp outside the gate (for we had strict rules about who was allowed inside). The Whorehouse of a Thousand Sighs was a little oasis,
a place to forget the heat and the loneliness. When they were done in the bedrooms they would drink and eat and laugh and tell stories about their trips and their trades, and we would serve and listen and laugh until they were ready for a second round or, even better, simply wanted to sleep.

  Their little caravans made long, slow journeys between outposts in the desert, taking a couple of moons to get there and a couple of moons to return. When I was a girl back in the villages, if one little boy had something he really loved – like a shiny stone he’d found, say, or a stick shaped just like a sword – the bigger boys would tease him by stealing it then waving it in front of his face. The little boy would reach out to grab it, and then a big boy would toss it to another friend a bit further away. The little boy would run towards this boy but just before he reached him the trinket would be thrown to another boy even further away. The game would go on like this until the big boys got bored or the little boy started screaming and crying and drew the attention of a nearby adult. The way the traders worked was a bit like that. They would go to an outpost in the desert and swap their fruit, for example, for silk. Then the people they traded with would make the journey to the next town and barter that fruit for more silk or perhaps some livestock. Then those traders would travel even further east while the other traders made their way back west. There must have been thousands of little groups doing deals like this, somehow linking us to the middle kingdom in the east on one side and the great ocean in the west on the other. That’s what the traders said, anyway. And it got me thinking that maybe all my days in the Empress’s whorehouse were just small parts of a much greater journey, and that made things a little easier.

  We didn’t have any important customers until I’d been here for about two summers. I remember I was taking my afternoon nap, having already cleaned up the main courtyard after the guests of the night before had gone on their way, when the tinkling of the Empress’s little bell cut through my dreams. By the time I’d shaken off the slowness of sleep and pushed through the stubborn door, the cook and the other girls, as well as Homely and Tall – who usually kept about as far away from the rest of us as they could, as if they could not bear to acknowledge the fact that we were all kept here for the same reason – were all gathered outside the Empress’s room. I’d been in there many times by that point, to clean up and take orders and bring her food, and let me tell you, I’ve never seen a room as plush as that. More cushions and colours and silks and trinkets than you’d believe, all surrounding her huge bed. But what was truly shocking that day was that instead of anyone going into the room, the Empress was coming out.