World Whisperer Read online

  "Get your eyes off my soul, Loshy," he said, his voice fierce as he looked down at her basket of sticks.

  "My name isn't Loshy and where were you this morning, Jak? Dead asleep from overeating? You should get out here earlier and find your own wood. You know you can't take wood from a temple daughter."

  He spat at the ground then, and a tiny drop caught in the wind and flew up to Isika's cheek. She took a step back, finally looking away from his face, wiping at her cheek with the sleeve of her dress.

  "You're no temple daughter, what a joke," he said, his eyes bulging as he kept them trained on Isika's shoulder. "And your father is dying— his well-deserved punishment for bringing foreigners into the temple."

  Isika felt as though he had slapped her. A bird cried out and the sound echoed around the quiet forest. The losh trees were bare at this time of year, tall, with long black limbs and hard wood that was perfect for burning. "Loshy," they had called Isika in school because her skin was the darkest out of all her siblings, nearly as black as her mother's. She looked at her hands now as she clutched the old basket, and remembered her mother's hands holding hers before she died, her mother, wasted away, commanding her with feverish eyes to take care of her brothers and sisters.

  The terrible fear she felt now at the possibility of her father dying was even greater than the daily dread she felt at him continuing to live and breathe and be disappointed in Isika and her siblings. He had taken them in and cared for them, and even though his care was hard to feel sometimes, without him Isika knew the village would not keep them. With her mother dead, Isika didn't know where they would go. She knew that her stepmother, Jerutha, could not change the minds of the Workers. Jerutha would try, because she was brave and kind. She had moved into the house of a priest and four black children, a house of mourning and bad luck, even after one daughter had been given over and the mother had died of grief. She had married the priest out of pity for the children, and she would stand up for them out of love, but there was only one of her and too many villagers. Many of them had no mercy in their hearts. Isika's father couldn't die.

  "You know nothing about it," she said, but she was shaking and she could hear fear in her own voice.

  Jak smiled, his eyes narrowing. "Oh, really?" he said. "Is there another plan? One we haven't heard yet? I haven't heard bells yet, but maybe they'll ring soon."

  Isika moved before she thought, her hands itching to knock the smile off his face, but she stopped in time, tightening her hands on her basket to keep them still. She gulped large breaths and tried to calm down. It was as though he had found her greatest, most secret fear, and prodded with something sharp. Fear washed over her like cold water. It was not of the possibility of being alone at the mercy of the people who had never trusted them. Her worst fear was the bells. But no! She shook her head against it. The goddesses had never forced any family to give over more than one child, and this was truth she clung to, even when sharp dreams of boats woke her in the night.

  "One child has always been enough," she said.

  Jak smiled wider, leaning against one of the bare trees of the forest. His feet were bare, like Isika's. His family might have enough money for wood, but not for shoes, and that made them more alike than different. But he was glad to see her panic, and she told herself there was nothing similar between them.

  "Your 'father' is a priest, and he is dying," Jak said. "Do you think he'll keep foreigners safe rather than appease the goddesses? He has no priest trained up to follow him—if he dies, the Workers are left without the offerings. He knows his duty."

  Worse, Isika thought. Her father was afraid of dying. She could smell his fear in the nighttime, when he got up and paced and her own terror grew until it was as large as her chest and leaked out through her eyes, making damp spots on the pillow beneath her head.

  Jak laughed. Isika remembered that he had been especially cruel to Benayeem, who had learned to fight for his life in the village school after they came out of the desert. Jak reached out and pulled the basket from her shaking hands. He emptied every stick but one into his own basket.

  "I'll be waiting for the bells," he said. And he was gone, stomping away through the forest. Isika could hear him long after she couldn't see him anymore. She began to gather wood again, taking deep breaths to calm herself and drive back her anger. The sun was barely up and already it was hot on her head, so she put her headscarf on, tucking it under her heavy hair. After another half hour, she felt she had enough. Her stepmother had slipped a few coins into her dress pocket the night before—"In case you can't gather it all," she had said, and Isika decided to buy the rest of the day's wood. Her father would never know. He wasn't the same as he had been in the past, when he oversaw absolutely everything. Since he had become sick, he rarely checked the wood to see if it was forest wood or the shorter, neater logs the woodmen sold in the market.

  Isika put her basket on her shoulder and left the woods to walk on the road. The dust swirled around her feet and the sun pounded on her head, its rays glistening on the dangerous broken glass that adorned the walls on either side of the road. The houses behind the walls seemed heavy and quiet, as though no one was in them, but Isika knew people lived behind the closed doors. She watched the wall glass sparkle in the sun until she reached the market square. She wandered through the market and bought tomatoes from Faiza, the kind woman with the bright red hair who always pressed her hand gently as she passed Isika her change. The tomato seller had been friendly with Isika's mother. She bought goat milk from the man with the long nose who had repaired the temple roof two months ago. His twins were sleeping under a tent behind him while his wife sat spinning goat wool. She looked at Isika briefly, nodded, and looked away.

  "May your eyes be guarded," the man said in the traditional greeting. He passed her the goat milk in a leather bag.

  "And your speech kept safe," Isika replied, taking the bag and handing him a few coins.

  She wandered around the market as long as she could, purchasing a bag of wheat to pound and a small packet of meat for the day's meal. She would help Jerutha harvest greens from the garden plants that still struggled along in the season of hot sun.

  At home she let herself in through the gate and brought the wood to the kitchen. Jerutha was standing over the sink, washing dishes. She leaned over to pick more dishes from the pile on the bench beside her and sighed. Her belly was round as a ball and Isika knew her back hurt her. Her time was growing near. Together, she and Isika had been preparing the birth space, a small room on their grounds, the custom for Worker women when they gave birth.

  Isika laid the sticks beside Jerutha on the floor and bent over to make the cooking fire in the grate. They would begin cooking the day's meal soon. But Jerutha turned to Isika as she pulled the larger sticks from the basket.

  "Your father wants to see you," she said. "I'll ask Ben to make the fire."

  "Benayeem? Make a fire?" Isika said, her voice incredulous.

  "You know he can do it," Jerutha said, her voice reproachful, but she was smiling.

  "When have you ever seen him make a fire?"

  "He has his temple work. It keeps him busy there."

  Isika looked at her stepmother with raised eyebrows. Jerutha smiled at her. "Go to your father."

  Then Isika realized what she was saying, and her stomach clenched with dread.

  "Why does he want to see me?"

  "He didn't say." Jerutha's voice was light but Isika saw the frown on her face. She mulled over the different reasons that her father could want to speak to her first thing in the morning, and none of them were good. Scolding, a work assignment. She shrugged off the idea that came next. An announcement. She stood and shook herself, standing as tall as she could before walking to her father.

  CHAPTER 2

  Her father's sleeping room smelled like sickness. Jerutha helped him up to bathe often, and Isika changed the sheets under him daily, but the odor persisted, and Isika hated being in the room more eve
ry day. The light hurt her father's eyes, so the curtains were pulled tight over the windows, and Isika could barely see him as she walked in. As her eyes adjusted, she saw him sitting up on his mat, his legs crossed and tucked under him, his eyes closed. She recognized his praying posture, so she waited for him to acknowledge her.

  Finally, he looked up.

  "Isika. Did you get the wood?" he asked. His eyes were shadows in his face. She couldn't see into them at all.

  "Yes, Father," she said. She found that her hands were shaking, and she grabbed the right one with the left to make them still.

  "I called you in here…" he paused, and coughed, "because today I want you to make the offering at the temple."

  "Why? That's Ben's job," Isika said before she thought, then flinched, knowing her father would be angry. He didn't move toward her though, only looked at her. She couldn't see his expression.

  "Go now. Don't come back until the noon meal." He bowed his head and returned to his prayers.

  Isika felt frustration burning through her. Her life was a series of commands without explanation, rules without the ability to understand. She was always confused and struggling with the way Workers did things, and why. Why was their house tired, old, and sad? Why did her father refuse things that helped with the work, like buying wood? Why did they wear dark colors and why weren't they allowed to bring flowers into the house or climb trees? The answers she got, when she got answers, were unsatisfying. She ached from wanting to speak, to say all the words that were silently building up inside her, but she knew by now that speaking would mean a burning cheek and a bruise the next day.

  "Yes, Father," she said. She bent her head and turned to go.

  Her feet dragged in the dust as she walked to the temple. She had never liked doing temple work. Benayeem didn't like it either, but he didn't have a choice— Nirloth, their father, had decided that Ben would be the one to become priest when he died. Isika doubted that the villagers would ever allow a foreigner to become their priest, but still Benayeem did the temple duties, day after day. It seemed to Isika's eyes that her brother accepted everything that happened with silence. He never spoke out, the way she did. She couldn't tell what he truly thought about anything. It was almost as though he could button himself up inside his skin, shrink into himself so that nothing of his true self was visible. Isika sometimes thought that she would love him more if she actually knew who he was. They were very different. Isika lived with more risk, unable to hold back her thoughts unless she clamped down on herself hard. As a result, it wasn't strange for her to be in bed with a cold cloth over her face after her father struck her.

  The temple of the four goddesses was the one bright point in the Worker landscape. Their village and the surrounding plains were flat and dry, with scrubby bushes, the Losh forests, and a few Yuci trees that didn't add much color, with their gray, washed-out trunks and dull leaves. And Workers didn't like to use too many colors because it was said that the goddesses were jealous of bright things. Their temple, in contrast, was dazzling; painted red with gold accents on all its square corners, a large red cube that rose suddenly out of the brown dust. Isika went in quickly and felt the darkness envelop her as she left the burning sunshine. The air was old with incense, and cool, despite the small sacred fire that was always kept burning. The stones were smooth beneath her feet. She walked toward the terrifying statues and picked up the bells, ringing them to wake the four goddesses. She began to light the cubes of incense, chanting the words for the morning offering as she did so.

  Power, fate, independence, wealth, four sisters, four realms, I bow to you.

  I bow to you, power, for you hold everything in sway.

  I bow to you, fate, for you have written the end.

  I bow to you, independence, for you hold up our heads.

  I bow to you, wealth, for you feed the bellies of men.

  She said the words quickly, and as she chanted she frowned, the familiar anger rising in her.

  Her mother had died during the famine of the deaf ears, three years after they arrived in the village. There had been a drought for three long years, with no rain falling on the earth to beat back the terrible dust or allow the crops to grow. By the third year, the Workers were starving, and they offered more children over during that time than they had sent out in a hundred years. The boat makers frantically hammered together the tiny boats that the villagers used to send their children out to the sea where they died in the waves as an offering for the goddesses. Despite the children they received that year, the goddesses hadn't heard the Workers. They turned deaf ears. Many more children starved.

  The goddesses even turned their backs when Nirloth decided that Isika's younger sister Aria needed to be given over. Aria was eight years old, far too old to be sent out, but Ibba, three years old and the right age for the sacrifice, was their father's favorite and he refused to give her over. They sent Aria out in the little boat, and Isika saw her face to this day, quiet, sleeping after the offering tea that sent the children to sleep, mercifully, so they didn't have to be awake for the moment they were pushed out on the sea to die at the goddesses's hands. Isika still remembered the dread in her stomach, the prickling all along her arms and legs that meant something was terribly, horribly wrong. Paralyzing fear had surged over her, and though she wanted to change something, anything, she was helpless. She had no power or ability to change the world or even Nirloth's mind.

  Isika's mother, Amani, went into labor that very night and baby Kital was born. Amani lived for only two more weeks. She died of grief, Isika knew. Losing Aria and the wrongness of her death took their mother from them. Even all of her other children, even her new baby, weren't able to make up for her sorrow enough to keep her with them. Isika hadn't been able to do anything about that either.

  She chanted the words again, thinking of her mother in bed in those last days, how small she had become, shrunken and frail as she refused to eat. She gave Kital, the little brown baby she had just birthed, to eleven-year-old Isika, and then she gave up her life and floated away.

  Kital became Isika's truest love, even as he wore the life straight out of her. Isika remembered the wild predictions of the villagers before Kital's birth. Kital was the son of Nirloth and Amani, and no one had ever seen the offspring of a black person and a white person. The egg seller had gone far enough to suggest that he would be striped, like a cat. But Kital came out a lovely, soft brown, and then Isika stopped going to school, staying home to watch the baby. She looked on with pride as his scrawny little body became a decently meaty body—not fat, never fat—as the famine lessened, too late to save Aria or her mother.

  Isika walked with Benayeem and baby Kital over the endless brown fields of Worker land, trying to tire her horrible grief right out of her body. When Kital got older, he toddled around in the trees and went with Isika to gather sticks in the morning. He made everything better, though it had seemed like things would never be okay again. Isika hadn't known how she could ever survive the loss of her mother, who had been the sun in the morning. She made everything bright, even on the dullest day, when nothing else penetrated the thick haze of the sky. Amani had helped Isika to understand the people of the Worker village and why they looked at the little family with suspicion.

  "They are afraid of what they don't understand," she told Isika. "And they don't understand what they have not experienced, because they haven't ever tried. I know it is hard, but you need to learn from the way it makes you feel. Learn to live without fear."

  Isika told Kital the same thing, later. "Mama's mother always told her this, when she was a little girl: Fear is the thing that grips the heart and ties the limbs. Live without it and you can truly love."

  She finished the chanting in the temple, the words still echoing in the smoky, incense-scented air. Power, fate, independence, wealth. The four goddesses they were taught to fear. No one questioned them and their cruel demands. Before Aria was sent out, Amani had been mostly happy in the Worker vill
age. She had her small kitchen garden, she coaxed flowers from the earth where no flowers had grown before, though she never was allowed to gather them and bring them into the house. But she quailed before the goddesses. She didn't like to go to the temple; one of the few things she and Isika's father argued about before Aria and the sending. She remained at the doorstep to the temple, her head bowed.

  "It's not the belief of my people," she told Nirloth, pleading with him when he insisted that she come in.

  "You can't even tell me who your people are," he replied. "You don't even know where you came from. And you're here now! The people notice you and wonder who this priest has taken for his wife, that she refuses to enter the temple."

  He had been right about that. Isika placed the bell back into its alcove and pulled the broom from the space behind the altar, sweeping the ashes into a neat pile, then slowly cleaning the interior of the temple where the feet of so many people trod each week, looking for reasons for their failures and pain. More, more, the goddesses cried, more worship, more sacrifice. Isika felt their hunger in the stones under her feet. The blame for the Workers' pain fell squarely on themselves. Isika shuddered and left the temple with relief. She started across the field that led to the house, and just as she did so, the wailing started.

  CHAPTER 3

  "Benayeem!" Jerutha called from the door to the house. Ben heard her from behind the back wall, where he sat looking out over the fields. He was putting off his ordinary job of doing the temple work, which he hated with a loathing deeper than anything, except, perhaps, the memories of the walled city, memories he tried to keep shut away. Day after day, though, he was stuck doing something he hated. It was that or suffer the consequences from his father.