The Book of Crows Read online

  That was probably the day Claws turned. She had always been a little cruel in her teasing, but after that she was plain vicious. Of course, it’s easy to look back now and say, oh yes, that was definitely the day everything changed. But at the time it was just another party to clean up. Sometimes I wonder if I’m telling this whole thing wrong – when I think about Tiger’s story, or Silk’s, I realise that I would only have the smallest of roles in them, a short description or an anecdote or two and then I’d probably just fade into the background, and that makes me question whether you can ever understand anybody’s life at all. Still, you’ve got to try though, haven’t you?

  Claws was sullen and impatient with all of us for the first few weeks after the official’s visit, but we hardly noticed at the time. She seemed to take pleasure tugging out the knots in our hair as carelessly as she could, and grabbed any opportunity that arose to point out our flaws – Silk’s big nose, Tiger’s sticky-out ears, my small breasts – and remind us of every complaint or bit of gossip she had overheard customers mention after a night with one of us – Silk lying there like a cold corpse, Tiger behaving like a man trapped in a woman’s body, me so sweaty the room smelt, and so on.

  We did a good job of ignoring her and shrugging off these comments, especially since we had other things to talk about. For weeks we gossiped about the rich men and how different they were from our regulars. The white-haired man’s peculiar slobbering over Silk’s feet, the rude young man’s lazy desire for Tiger to ride him like a horse, or my young man showing himself to be so poor at handling liquor that he fell asleep halfway through the main event. Sometimes Homely would saunter over and joke about the ‘exquisite girth of the official’s military instrument’. Claws would hover on the edge of these conversations, veering between trying to join in and treating us with disdain, as if we were silly children. We paid her little attention and did our best not to make fun of her for being left out that night. Looking back, I think that’s what riled her most. I think she would have preferred our teasing – then at least she would have known how to respond. It was our pity that she couldn’t handle.

  I remember one afternoon when she accused Silk of having stolen some of the powder she used to keep her hair bedtime-black. I was having a nap, so I only heard about it from Tiger. I was woken by the sound of shrieking, but by the time I made my way outside all I got to see was Silk pushing past me into our room. Tiger said that they had been fighting so loudly that the Empress herself had left her quarters and come and thrown a bucket of cold water over both of them. I saw the clump of hair that Silk had wrenched from Claws’ head lying in the damp puddle, and when a tearful Silk finally emerged from our room for supper that evening the scratch marks running down her face were as fresh and pink as a summer evening. The Empress told the cook not to serve Claws for two days after that. She said it was one thing for us girls to have our petty squabbles, but quite another to damage her merchandise and run the risk of a loss of profits when the customers saw Silk’s criss-cross scars.

  Claws stayed tucked up under a blanket on her straw bed for days at a time after that, and when she did come out of the room her eyes would not stop darting between us. When customers arrived she would suddenly become light-hearted, full of jokes and fluttery laughs. Yet the next morning she would return to her previous state and remain sullen and snappy. Instead of picking fights, she soon took to ignoring us all together, though she often gave the impression that she was waiting eagerly for one of us to give her an opportunity to pounce. This didn’t happen until about two moons after the officials had left.

  That morning Tiger, Silk and I were washing our dresses in the big wooden buckets in the courtyard. Claws was sitting a little distance away, sharpening her long nails on one of the cook’s spare stubs of flint.

  ‘Go to the Empress, girl,’ Silk was saying. ‘You know you have to. I’ve seen these things in the clouds: a struggle, something unexpected. You better get her to make something up before it’s too late.’

  ‘I’ll ask her tomorrow,’ Tiger said. ‘It could still come.’

  Even I could see she was just making excuses now. ‘After eight weeks? Come on.’

  ‘I know,’ Tiger sighed. ‘I hate that man. I hate him with every pore of my skin, with every single one of my pulses, with every thought stirring in my heart. But …’

  ‘Couldn’t you talk to the Empress about it? I mean, wouldn’t it be simplest just to do nothing?’ I asked. The two of them stopped washing and turned to stare at me. ‘What? It’s not so crazy. Don’t you want to, one day?’

  Silk shook her head. ‘The Empress would rather cut your throat than let that happen. Nine moons off work and when it’s all done your breasts will sag, your stomach will droop and the customers won’t want to go anywhere near you.’

  ‘She didn’t just buy our bodies: she bought our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our futures,’ Tiger muttered.

  ‘Oh, don’t say that. You know I hate it when you say things like that.’

  ‘It’s the truth. Who would want a child to be born into this life? Better to never know love or beauty than to see them every day twisted into coins and aches. Better to never be born than to be born to this. I’ll drink her stinking poison. I’m not afraid,’ Tiger said.

  From across the courtyard we heard Claws snort back a scornful laugh. Silk raised her eyebrows as Claws raised herself up and walked towards us.

  ‘You want a family, Jade? What for – to watch them struggle through this shitty world, to suffer yourself every time they suffer? Haven’t you got enough to cry over with your youth sucked dry and your body already crooked and stretched out of shape, with your pathetic hopes and soppy songs you hum while you’re cleaning – that’s right, we can hear you when you’re doing that, and when you’re moaning at night for your daddy to come and help you. Fat fucking chance.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Tiger hissed at her.

  ‘Or do you want to be like Miss High-and-Mighty here, pretending you’re not afraid of anything and that just because you used to be someone you’re better than the rest of us? Or do you want to be like her over there, spending your life looking at clouds because anything is better than looking at your own face in the mirror? Huh?’

  ‘Enough!’ Tiger thrust her hand up into Claws’ face.

  Claws hocked and spat on the floor at our feet before turning away, muttering under her breath. Tiger shook her head and began to squeeze the water from one of her dresses, but Silk was red and on the verge of tears. When she spoke her voice shook like the spindly branches of a young tree in the wind. ‘She’s just bitter because she couldn’t hold onto her own little boy back when she had the chance.’

  As she swung back round, Claws gave out the kind of sound you might expect a wounded animal to make. Her eyes were the sharp spark of stone on flint, and in that second before she screamed again and threw herself forward her face seemed to move through such strange contortions that it looked as though she had become another person entirely. She lunged at Silk, who threw up her arms to shield herself from the furious slashes of those long jagged talons. I leapt up to pull Claws off but instead her elbow swung back and smashed into my nose, sending me tripping and stumbling into the table, blood dribbling down my chin. Both of the women were screaming and spitting at each other, and when I looked up again I saw that Silk had grabbed Claws’ hair by the roots and was trying her best to wrench out whole clumps of it. I put my hand to my throbbing nose, pinching it to stop the bleeding while I pushed myself up with my free hand. It was then that I heard the most high-pitched ear-piercing glass-shattering migraine-making blood-curdlingly-terrible scream I have ever heard. I still have nightmares about it sometimes. I wake up clammy with goosebumps, remembering how Silk screamed and then staggered back, gagging and choking for air, a thin line of blood trickling down her cheek and sticking to her hair, and how Claws was also stumbling unsteadily, her face suddenly pallid, the mangled dripping egg-white ooze of what remained of Silk
’s left eye still impaled on her fingernail. Silk started to howl and clutch at her face. There was a curdled mess of thick blood and gunk left in the socket, and her other eye began to blink wildly in shock. Claws began to retch. It must have been then that the Empress appeared, ready to throw another bucket of cold water on the pair of them, but she quickly realised it was too late for that. I’m not sure exactly what happened after that. I sank back to the ground, feeling dizzy and nauseous as blood continued to flow from my nose. The next few hours were swallowed up with shrieking and sobbing.

  I know that the Empress eventually led Silk away to one of the huts in the cook’s courtyard, and I remember that Claws threw up at some point, splattering a puddle of vomit over a couple of the nicest cushions. But the order of those events is not particularly clear in my mind. Despite the horror of the situation, in many ways the whole scene felt just like a dream, and even the following morning I half thought I might see Silk walking about as usual with both of her big brown eyes staring up at the clouds. The thing that bothers me now – that bothers me precisely because I did not register the fact until I looked back at the event some days later – is that all the time the two of them were fighting and screaming, and even when they had staggered apart in the awful aftermath of that sudden malicious gouge, Tiger had stood in the same spot, expressionless and impassive, almost as if she had expected something like this to happen and was neither surprised nor particularly interested in what she saw.

  The next morning I had a wonk in my nose, a restless cicada buzzing somewhere inside my head and two black eyes – though I was grateful for the pair of them. I left our room while the others were still snoring. The courtyard was silent, and if it hadn’t been for the light worming through the cracks in the wall I would have thought it was still the dead of night. In the end my stomach got the better of me and I fastened my day robe and set off up the trail to the cook’s courtyard. He was talking to the camels when I got there, running his blackened hands through their knotted beards as they clicked their teeth together. The fire had gone out.

  ‘No breakfast today,’ he said.

  I didn’t bother to ask him why. I already knew. His eyes moved from the huge hairy beasts to the closed door of the wooden hut across from him.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Not too good, if you ask me,’ he said. ‘But she’ll live. The herbman’ll be coming down later. The mistress has taken away all the glass so she can’t take a peek at herself, but I’m not sure that’s going to be enough. You ladies haven’t got much without your looks now, have you? The mistress told her she’ll buy her a beautiful leather patch to make her look as good as new, but I don’t think that made her feel better.’

  ‘Can I visit her?’

  ‘Better not. The Empress is pretty pissed off with you lot right now. Can’t say I blame her. Four girls and every single one of them a mess. This one deformed, you with a nose so bent out of shape you look closer to sixty than sixteen and the bitchy one gone half mad at what she’s done. Meanwhile the other one’s going be laid up for at least a whole moon recovering from the cleansing potion. Yep, she picked a good time springing that on us in the middle of all this chaos. This place is going to be seriously out of pocket for a while.’

  He shook his head and moved to the side of one of the camels, running his hands through its thick fleece, checking for fleas.

  ‘You see this beast here? Let me tell you something: it earns its keep. All the way from Persia, and the best damn trade we ever made. It doesn’t eat much, a little grazing every few days perhaps, and it doesn’t complain when it’s hungry or tired. Sheds its hair when the frost goes and we can wind that into rope or knit it into warm clothes. Almost every day it gives us its milk for drinking or butter or for me to make into liquor for the guests. When it dies we can eat the meat and cure the skin for bags and straps. I mean, even its shit is useful – we wouldn’t be able to get a fire going to cook dinner without it. And you know what? It’s always calm, always quiet, never fights with the other or makes a fuss. Sure, it can get fidgety when it’s horny, but apart from that it keeps itself to itself and just gets on with the day. It doesn’t get into any silly squabbles. Seems to me you lot could learn a thing or two from it.’

  I left him to his stinking humped horses and went back down to the courtyard. He had some cheek. I cursed him for comparing us to animals. Then my rumbling stomach cursed the Empress for punishing all of us for Claws’ anger. Then my aching nose and heavy eyes cursed Claws and Silk for grinding each other down, and Tiger for getting herself into such a mess and starting the whole argument. For good measure I cursed all the men who had come through here and led me into the guestrooms, and I cursed the big men who had captured and sold me, and I cursed my father for being such a good-for-nothing and leading us into dangerous territory, and finally, when I had no one else to curse, I cursed myself.

  Since Claws refused to get up, staying in our room muttering and sobbing and wailing, and with the Empress spending her time fussing over Silk, I was ordered to look after Tiger when she took the potion. As soon as I had smelt that vicious concoction brewing in the courtyard I knew it was going to be nasty. The Empress seemed to have gathered the most repulsive leaves and shrubs she could find and then stewed them down to a lumpy brown sludge. Tiger gagged and coughed as she tried to swallow all four cupfuls of the stuff, and I can’t say I was surprised that the Empress left two empty buckets by the side of the little straw bed in the hut next to Silk’s.

  I would compose myself and try to keep a friendly face as I pushed open Tiger’s door and went in, but it wasn’t always easy. The room smelt of stale sweat and farts. Yet despite the stomach cramps and the bleeding, she remained much the same as ever.

  ‘I hope it kills me as well,’ she said between gritted teeth the day the syrupy blood began seeping down her thighs. It was warm and sticky and lumpy. ‘I hope I keep bleeding till my whole insides come out, till I’m hollow and emptied. I hope I bleed so much this whole fucking mountain drowns in blood.’

  I didn’t know what to say. ‘At least this will mean you won’t be getting any men climbing on top of you for a while,’ I said, trying to lighten the mood.

  It had the desired effect – she laughed.

  ‘I never let them go on top of me. Never. I go on top, or we lie side to side. That’s one of my rules. And I hope this poison makes me so green that next time a man lies with me his prick will shrivel up and fall off afterwards. I hope it mangles me so bad that every time a man comes in he’ll begin to squirm and yelp until his cock begins to burn and crackle and melt down to a scabby stump while I look down and laugh in his face.’

  I thought it was probably better to let her speak, let it all come out. Just like the potion. Perhaps it was supposed to cleanse her thoughts as well as her womb, to wash everything away.

  Each day I brought her bowls of broth and gave her a wash; I helped her change clothes and replaced the swabbing cloth between her legs; I cleaned out her fetid buckets, and when she was up to it I led her on little walks around the cook’s courtyard. She took tiny steps, leaning on my arm, and always insisted that we stop for breaks near Silk’s hut to see if we could hear anything from inside. We hadn’t seen her in almost a week.

  ‘Did you know about Claws’ baby?’ I whispered to her during one of our walks.

  Tiger shrugged. ‘Only what Silk mentioned. Remember when we drank that liquor on Silk’s birthday and the two of them stayed up chatting after we went to bed? Well, Silk told me that Claws mentioned him that night, and then swore her to secrecy the next morning. ‘It seems when the war finished and the soldiers took her prisoner, they had a bit of fun with her. They only sold her on to slave traders once she had grown fat and they were bored with her, so the boy’s father could have been any one out of that whole platoon. The slave traders had stopped for the night in some piss-poor village when she felt the baby coming. She told Silk she snuck away from the snoring men and squatted down in a field
to give birth, and then later bit the cord off with her own teeth. As you can imagine, after all of that effort she was cold and exhausted. She tiptoed off to a small house and asked the old woman there to keep the baby by the fire for the night so he could stay warm. The old woman agreed to let Claws sleep in her barn. You can guess the rest: when she woke up after a long, deep sleep she found herself in a wooden cage being carried through the desert, with the village far, far behind her.’

  ‘And then?’ I asked.

  Tiger laughed. ‘And then nothing. That’s the end, and here we all are as proof.’

  I helped her back to the hut and tucked the ragged blanket around her. As always, instead of thanking me, Tiger did her best to ignore the fact that I was there.

  Trying to get to sleep that night, with Claws snuffling and murmuring in the corner, I wondered if I hadn’t got my opinion of her wrong, if we’d all judged her too quickly. But as she herself had said, you have to forget the past to keep going here. I thought about her little boy, where he might be now and if he even knew whose son he was, and I have to be honest, it made me feel pretty low. I’d always imagined I’d grow up and have a family to look after. If you haven’t got someone else to care for, you stop caring at all. I don’t claim to know much about history and time and all those silly things the emperor’s men were arguing about, but it seems to me that if you don’t have a family then you don’t have a history. Your history stops. You disappear.

  But then what good would I be anyway? I wondered. I never knew my mother and my father was more trouble than comfort. I was just like the other three, too broken now to be much good in the world below. Claws and her bitterness, Silk and her hopeless ideas, Tiger and her buried anger. And me and my useless wishes. As I sat there stewing in self-pity, I realised for the first time that although the door to our room was never bolted from the outside anymore, I had not once thought about running away. Not seriously, anyway. The truth was, the world below scared me. The mere thought of walking down the track made me feel dizzy. At least here I knew who I was. If I hated Claws and Silk and Tiger sometimes, it was only because when I looked at each of them I saw what I might turn into. If I loved them sometimes, it was only because I had no one else to give my love to. Perhaps, as Silk says, everything that can happen will happen, and you can either struggle against its pull or drift along in its current. I’d had enough of struggling.