Nomvula

28 - The Fruits of War

"It isn't right, Anket." Asanda clipped a woody shoot from one of the five pots of rosemary on the stone table set in the middle of her garden. She had to fight to keep her focus from being fully absorbed by the snap of the stem, the shear of her clippers, just as she fought with every task. It was like trying to split the Wayfarer with a wooden post. "Mama has dealt with unruly diplomats before. She is keeping something from me."

Anket's grey beard was white at the tips, paled by the sun he loved so much. The mesh wiring that protected the rooftop garden left a pattern of shadows over a face the dark yellow of marula skin.

"She is your mother," the old Kemite said, inspecting three dark spots on a ginger root. He laughed in the way old people did that settled nerves. "If she kept nothing from you, you would never respect her again. Besides, Stray Cloud, it is not uncommon for children to be unsettled when they see their parents in a moment of weakness."

I've seen Mama cry before, I've seen her too tired to get out of bed, too sick to eat even millet porridge...

"...but I've never seen her scared." Asanda's frown deepened wh.en she realised she'd shared the thought aloud.

Anket's laugh seemed to drift between the vines of pale ivy crawling up tall lattices, under the many benches of incubated seedlings, between every exotic leaf and around the many fat and deadly fruits drooping down around them. "One day you will be under her crown, or close enough, and you will see every sort of terror... Did you hear that?"

She searched for the two walls that split her mind in three. In the first third, she gave all focus to the menial task of trimming the herbs in front of her. It was just a small task to keep Anket's hands busy so they would not be still too long and stiffen. In the middle third, where she did her best thinking, she gave herself over to exploring all that had happened in the last two days: Mama's outburst at Dumani after coming back from the Old Ones, the buna poisoning, the half a dozen threats she had heard her peaceful, doting mother make in the last two days, this talk of meeting with her father's killer.

She gave Anket the final third, and looked up at the swollen joints of his trembling fingers. The arithmetician's arthritis, he called it, almost in jest. In the Hundred Hills, they were just called old hands.

"I made more numbing unguent for Lifa this morning," she said. "I want to restock your personal vial when we're done here."

Anket's attention was on the trap door that led down to Asanda's bedroom. His brow knitted together its many creases. "Is someone downstairs?"

Something broke with the sound of wood exploding and brass sliding across the floor. Her bedroom door. Lifa!

"Asanda, stay here!" Anket said to her back.

Asanda tossed aside her clippers and plucked a fist-sized pepperpod fruit from a hanging vine as she shuffled towards the trapdoor, still careful to keep her skin from touching her more potent plants.  She should have kept the Inner Plainer up here, as if one door and Anathi would have been enough to keep one of Dumani's assassins away.

Asanda threw open the trapdoor and started down the ladder, throwing down the walls in her mind and letting it burst all over like a burst dam. As her eyes adjusted from the brightness of the noonday sun to the soft alchemical glow of her runelights, she almost tripped over a small body.

Anathi was on her hands and knees, her small ribs like billows as she tried to catch her breath as she pointed somewhere in the room. It had been two years since anything had brought the strange girl out of hiding and made her visible to the naked eye; that alone sent Asanda's stomach spiralling into her bladder. Then she saw where Anathi pointed, and the river of her mind grew still.

"Help me."

Her mother stood in the middle of the room among a mess of brass and splinters, one eye swollen shut, her clothes only hanging off her body by the grace of her belt. Her bare breasts were smeared black clay and blood. She pressed her left arm to the spreading bruises on her belly, while her right couched the limp, hollow-breathing body of the Royal Diviner.

"White water," Nomvula said in a voice that was only half her own. Her eyes flickered from their normal dark to twin chips of starlight that killed the runes on the ceiling whenever they brightened. "White water, now!"

The words sparked Asanda into action. Of everything her mother had taught her, obey white water had been drilled into her since she had been old enough to walk and speak. Dropping the pepperpod, she ran to her bed posted against the far wall and started to drag it away. It was the lightest bed in the manse for this exact purpose, but she was glad when Anathi fell in silently to help her. A single pane of glass just smaller than the bed reflected the flickering runelights as Asanda reached between bed frame and mattress and drew out a long-handled iron hammer.

Her mother's footsteps sounded like she stepped with the weight of ten men as she approached, her left eye burning silver-white. Asanda walled off her mind, keeping all her panic in the first third, where useless tasks went. Her mother had once described what it felt like when an Old One looked at you, the weight that settled on your bones, the lurch in your guts. She felt that now, but only in the way one felt a blanket over the shoulders.

In two fluid motions that she had been made to practice every day for the last eighteen years, she raised the hammer over her head and struck the glass true. It was designed to break all at once. Countless shards dropped into the chalky water just below the surface, already dissolving. Asanda backed up as Anathi pushed her to the far side of the secret pool. Nomvula approached from the opposite side, her limbs moving like those controlled by an ill-trained puppeteer.

In that first third of her mind, where every rational thought of skin-tearing fear threw itself against the walls, Asanda knew that she would weep as soon as the wall came down. For now, she watched unmoving as her mother tossed the Royal Diviner into the pool with inhuman strength, then stood at the pool's lip and looked down, her eyes shining like new stars.
She needs to get in too

And she was fighting to, but whatever possessed her held firm. Asanda made her way halfway around the pool before Anket was suddenly at her side, pulling her back.

"She needs to get in, Anket," Asanda said calmly.

"Look with your eyes, child, whatever holds her will kill you if you go near it."
"Blood does not kill blood." There was nothing in the world the other two thirds of her mind were surer of. "Ever."

Her mother's head snapped up, and whatever turned behind the brightness of her eyes, it turned every truth Asanda had ever held false with one look.

Anathi appeared behind her mother and mushed the two halves of the pepperpod in both eyes. The Queen's roar was ten voices knotted together in agony as she bent over.

Anathi spoke for the first time in ten years, her voice a tiny thing that shamed whispers. "Forgive."

She made the Queen kneel with a hammer blow to the back of the knee, then tried to push her into the pool, but she might as well have tried to move a house two metres. The Queen laid a hand on Anathi's chest and pushed her halfway across the room.

For a moment, the light in her eyes died, and she fell forward into the pool.