Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [66]
At the edge of the fence she stared out at the countryside, and the bright off-white sky where beneath the ocean surged, she knew, she knew. Standing on tiptoe she thrust her mind into the air. As she was about to leap from the ground vicious cramps doubled her over and she sank to her knees, vomiting, vomiting, vomiting over herself, over the ground.
A large dousing of water shocked her awake. She lay on the ground, in the middle of a long row of bodies. Without the sun holding high in the sky she would have thought she had been shot back to the hold of the ship. People moaned, retched, tried to roll over on their bellies, but found themselves constricted by the manacles and chains. Even as she tried to lie still the wrenching and tugging along the line pulled her this way and that.
Eventually calm settled over them and the tall pale-skinned man with the eye-mask walked among them, with two short and ugly men following.
The tall man—he seemed older than the others—pointed and said some words, and the ugly men unlocked manacles and detached people from the line, some of them going in one place off to the side, some to another as the tall man directed. Some people shouted, others struggled. The two uglies, using stanchions, beat down the ones who tried to resist and let them lie where they fell. When the tall man came to Lyaa he paused, and reached down to touch a finger to her cheek and then to her belly. Ah, she decided, a medicine man! And yes, he pointed, said more words, and the two uglies unlocked her and led her off to one side, with the group of people who appeared to be slightly fatter and more steady than the other group.
A thick-armed man as black as the sky without a moon said to his companions in this group that he understood what the pale-skins had said.
“Yes? Yes?” People clamored to hear. “How do you understand them?”
“On the ship, I listened, I learned,” he said.
“And what do you know now?”
“We are good,” he said. “They mean we are going to live, we are healthy as can be after the ship.”
“I am sick,” Lyaa said.
The man clucked at her.
“You are not sick. I heard what he said. You are carrying a child. They like that.”
“I am carrying a child?”
“You did not know?”
“I did not.”
“He said it was true.”
“Who said it?”
“The shaman, the tall one.”
Lyaa smiled to herself, and touched her belly lightly with her fingers.
“This is not just a child,” she said.
The old man gave her an inquiring look.
“What else could it be?” he said.
“The goddess,” she said. “My mother was, and her mother before her, and before all of them they were, and this new one, she will be, too.”
The old man paused, as if he were considering something to say, and what a luxury that was, after all the horrors of the journey they had endured. But a pale-skin holding a stick pointed it at him and beckoned for him to follow, and he left Lyaa there, pondering her new condition.
At least, though confused, she remained alive. Over the next days and weeks as she walked about the small pen where the pale-skins had put them, walls all around but the sun shining over head and plenty of birds flying, she felt in her heart that she had, that all of them had, been abandoned. Once she might have thought of herself as one of those birds about to fly, but now, weighed down with grief and homesickness and the literal weight of her growing belly, she heard the birds laugh at her, stupid, earthbound girl. But the child she was carrying? She had no doubts. It was not another creature to be bought and sold—it would be able to fly.
During the early morning, nearly every day of her stay in this pen, she could hear the moans and shrieks as the uglies came to cart away the sick and dying, while Lyaa and her group stayed strong. She knew for a fact—the tall dark man reported it to them—that the pale-skins gave them more food than the sickly ones. And after a few days the sickly ones would sink even further into their illnesses, and the uglies would come to remove