The Book of Flora Read online

  “Was he my father?”

  I had never asked him directly about my parents before. I had only recently begun to realize that other people had parents. The question seemed terrible and forbidden, yet impossible to ignore. I quivered all over, saying the words aloud. I thought Archie would explode.

  Instead he laughed.

  “Definitely not, kid. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

  “Why did he say you should name me Flora, then?”

  “He saw you, as a baby, fighting some other kid for her dress. You wouldn’t let go. You were stubborn and wild, like the place. Like the king.”

  “What was my name before that?”

  Archie stood and looked me over. “You didn’t have one. I wasn’t going to keep you.”

  “Why did you keep me?”

  “You used to eat bugs. Nobody would feed you, so you would just feed yourself. Take what you needed. Walk right over somebody to get it. You were gonna live, I could see it. You were a fighter. I figured you’d be useful. Now, come on.”

  We kept moving all day that day. Sometimes we had a car or a truck, but they were hard to get and harder to keep. We’d run out of deez in a place where no one knew how to brew it and have to abandon another to the rust or the scavengers of the road. Archie mistrusted horses, though we met traders regularly. I’d pet their noses as their drivers told us how broken, how gentle the beasts were.

  Sometimes I would think that Archie had picked up the horse traders’ way of talking. He would offer up kids in terms of their brokenness, their gentleness. He’d pull down their lips to show their teeth. He would travel on the backs of girl children all his life, he said. But never on a horse.

  I think he knew that horses could fight back when they didn’t like their treatment.

  We lived a long time in the high hills called Lachin, moving from town to town. The people there were isolated, hardly trading or passing news from one to the next. Later, I’d see the results of isolation in Ommun, with their number of redheads and albinos and a few with an extra finger or two. But I saw it first in those Lachin mountains, overrun with pale, spotty boys with double-jointed fingers and eyes that could look at today and tomorrow at the same time.

  Archie traded first for coal, black and mined from the ground and able to burn longer than wood. It smudged everything it touched and smoked fit to kill us, but he loved it. When word got out that he carried old-world bullets for trade, that’s when the folks who were willing to trade kids would appear.

  Archie did not trade in grown girls or women. More than once, I saw him strip a girl to the waist and declare that her breasts had fallen and he would make no offer for her. By the time I was eight summers old, I could head off a deal at the door and keep him from getting angry about it.

  “Take her home,” I’d tell them. “She’s too old for us.”

  Those girls would sell to someone else, without a doubt. Once the man holding her took it into his head to sell her, her age wouldn’t be a problem for almost anyone else. Archie was peculiar. Most of the girls and women I saw locked down in harems and traveling in chains were old enough to breed; often they seemed pregnant, or the rare ones were nursing a child. I never saw anywhere else as lucky as Ommun on that score, but I like to think they’re out there. After all, Ommun was hidden underground and I might never have known it was there if it hadn’t been for Eddy. In the secret places, on the islands and in the dark recesses of the earth, who knows what goes on?

  What went on in Archie’s world was always the same. The seller would come after dark if we were near a town. Slavers would boldly show us their goods on the road or the path, but settled folk were always guilty about it. In towns where slaving was forbidden, almost every one of them would insist we leave straightaway so they could pretend the child had been stolen.

  Archie would always agree, but with a warning. “If anyone from this town comes after me for child stealing or slaving, I’ll tell them flat out that you made the deal.”

  They rarely changed their minds.

  Sometimes the child would cry. If they were old enough to understand, if they hadn’t been sold before, or if Archie was mean, there were tears.

  Girls and boys alike would cry if they were older than four or five. They were rarely sold to Archie by their parents; most of them had been foundlings of one kind or another. The story would begin with goodness: I kept my sister’s son after she died or He was my neighbor’s boy. Archie would nod his head, listening to the justification despite the fact that he’d heard it all before.

  Then, the denial. I swore I would never do this or In better times I’d never have dreamed of selling the boy . . . Archie clucked his tongue and murmured his agreement that their crop blight was rotten luck indeed, or that a sickly child would be no good at raising goats.

  None of them ever asked what work Archie would sell the children into. Those who didn’t immediately know had seen me at work, with Archie’s sharp eye on me. I’d walk the edges of a lumberjacks’ camp or visit a brewery and cast my eye on the loneliest-looking men. I’d walk the streets of a small town at dusk when every man with a family or a Hive would be long gone home to them, and only the men with no one would notice my existence. This work didn’t bring in trade goods, but it brought daily necessities. I had a list of acceptable payments: cured meats, canned vegetables and fruits, dried tobacco, flour, well-made clothes. Archie would point me at a furrier or a bootmaker in season. Four or five nights’ work would mean boots for Archie, or a fur hat and gloves for me.

  Nobody would part with a baby. I shudder to think that I’d ever have been left in charge of a tiny child Archie had bought, but they were scarce everywhere. In the worst towns, in the midst of famine or in a slave-trading hub like Vana, babies were never for sale. A person with a baby believes in possibility. They carry the whole future in their hands.

  A person with a small child is tired. A person left with a child not their own isn’t connected in the same way, and the child is tiresome. Bratty. Whiny. Sickly.

  A child who is not a girl is just another boy. Just another part of someone else’s Hive. Easier to part with but harder to sell.

  So Archie’s favorites were difficult girls.

  Rare as they were, I met a few girls that people couldn’t wait to be rid of. There was Dinty, who was slow to learn and whined anytime the weather was hot or sticky. We picked her up in Vana, and Archie worked on her for over a moon while we traveled inland.

  The weather down there is humid for the better part of the year, even after the storms pass. Dinty complained endlessly.

  “My feet hurt. I’m sweating inside my boots. I’ve got blisters. Can we stop? When are we going to stop?”

  “If you keep that up, Archie’s going to give you something worse to whine about,” I told her in my lowest voice. I knew he could hear us; my quiet was more a signal of obedience than a hope that I would go unheard. I knew better. Half-blind as he was, Archie could hear a pig rooting for acorns a mile away. Nothing got past his ears.

  “I can’t help it,” she practically screeched. “I’ve never traveled this much. I can’t just walk all day. I’m so tired.” At this, she flopped herself down on a log that lay beside the road and sat, elbows on her knees, panting dramatically.

  I looked her over. She was darker-skinned than me, but still got burned every day. She had beautiful hair, nut-brown with lighter streaks where the sun touched it. I had braided it for her before we got on the road. That was long before I learned the intricate braiding of the horsewomen, but I wasn’t bad. She had two tight braids that began at her hairline and neatly tucked all her hair in to hang in a couple of tails that touched her shoulder blades.

  Dinty was skinny, as though she had had too much work and not enough food. She was old enough to get her blood, but the man who had sold her said it hadn’t come upon her and he suspected she would never breed. She was built like a boy, but when Archie stripped her to examine, she had all the usual girl parts, except
with a chest as flat as my own. She wasn’t pretty in a way that made up for that lack, either. Her front teeth stuck out from her mouth, and there was a big gap between the front two. Her eyes were a little buggy, giving her a look of constant surprise. Her lips were full, but she never seemed to close her mouth. More than once I saw her run the back of her hand across the lower one to swipe away drool from her chin.

  “She’s no beauty,” Archie had said, beginning to dicker for her price. “And she’ll never breed. What’s the use of her?”

  Dinty had been putting her clothes back on slowly, staring at the floor while my keeper negotiated with hers, a short white man with a long beard.

  “I figure she’ll do fine in a harem. No breeding means someone could get a lot of use out of her, without any time off.”

  “Have you?” Archie stared at the man, his eyes flinty.

  “Sure,” the man said. “She’s mine, ain’t she?”

  “Obedient, is she? Trained?”

  The girl hurried to button up her top.

  “Mostly.” The man shrugged. “Worth what I’m asking for her, anyway.”

  Archie began to lament the price he had paid almost at once, I could tell. He preferred difficult girls, but he couldn’t abide mouthy ones. I knew he would see to that immediately.

  And then here he was, seeing to it.

  He chewed his lip when he looked at her. I had tried to warn her, but she was as slow as could be. She could only learn this the hard way. I stepped away from her perch on the log and busied myself packing Archie’s pipe. I thought maybe if I got it going for him, he’d cut this lesson short.

  Archie walked calmly up to Dinty where she sat and hit her across the face with an open hand. She was so surprised that it knocked her to the ground, where she sprawled. I saw the line of drool from her mouth reach the dirt and turn red beneath her face.

  She came up blinking, bewildered. “What was that—”

  I wanted to tell her to stay down. Instead, I turned my back.

  He hit her again, the sound of his hand against her face as flat as if he had hit her with a wooden plank.

  “I can already tell that I paid too much for you, girl.” He balled a fist and punched her in the stomach. I knew because I heard the air rush out of her mouth in a whoof sound.

  He grabbed her by the hair and brought his mouth to her ear, though he did not lower his voice. “We stop when I say stop. You don’t sit down until you’re told. You don’t eat, shit, sleep, or talk until you’re told.”

  She was crying now, a high, keening sound like a baby.

  “You shut your mouth and follow along, or I’ll fix it so that your every step is agony. And you’ll follow along anyway.”

  I packed the pipe with Archie’s good tobacco, traded for in Vana and fresh in the leather sack. I tamped it down with my fingers and put the end of it in my mouth while I searched for his flint.

  He yanked Dinty upright and whirled her around to face me. “Your situation in life has changed. I’m not that toothless old man who used to own you. I am a trader, and I am going to turn you into something valuable, something I can sell. The sooner you act like that one”—here he pointed to me, and I looked over at them as detachedly as I could—“the sooner you will live pain-free days. Do you understand?”

  Dinty nodded her head, catching up at last.

  I got the dry leaves burning and took half a drag for myself. A little tobacco at midday perked me up as a child, and I miss it now. But there is none growing near here, and perhaps that is for the best. In my experience, a crop that is grown for anything but food or clothing is a luxury, and luxury does not exist without slavery.

  I held the pipe out to Archie and he took it from me, then patted my head. “That is how a good slave behaves,” he said to her while looking at me. “Anticipating my needs and working to meet them.” He patted my braids.

  He was only ever affectionate to me in this way, to make someone else feel worse by comparison. This was the love that I got as a child. It took so long to learn to trust anything given to me by a caring hand.

  Archie always wanted me in the morning. I think even then he was too old to rise more than once a day, and his once happened around sunup. When we were training a new slave, the process took much longer. Dinty resisted him so long that I began to think her former keeper had been lying about her use. Everything was new to her. She cried, she gagged, she wasted time saying no or begging to stop. It was weeks before she could successfully finish him off without my help.

  I was already inured to it and businesslike about the process. I thought it would be easier for her since she was older; her body was better suited to the work and she might even enjoy it, as I saw older girls could sometimes do (or at least pretend). But she was terrible at it. She couldn’t read the signs of arousal or progress. She had to be coached on what to say or how to hold herself. Archie had to physically take her hands away from her face, time and time again.

  In the end, he knew she would fetch no great price. The best she could manage was grudging acquiescence or motionless vacancy. When we reached a fishing village along the coast, we met a group of men who spoke a strange, fluid language of which we didn’t know a word. Through gesture and showing goods, Archie sold Dinty to a black-haired man who smelled like shrimp, and we left her there. She had been such a slow learner, I felt a terrible pang thinking how long it would be before she could make herself understood to them at all.

  The story of my time with Archie is a series of tragedies like these, in which I only barely grasped what was tragic. Every life is a tragedy in progress, and I certainly knew no better. But now, I think of each of them as a story that might never be told. Who was Dinty? Who were her people? What did she hope to become? Did she turn that whole fishing village into her Hive after a few years, or was she sold again? Is she living in the belly of a whale somewhere?

  Every child who passed through Archie’s hands passed through mine as well. I didn’t choose to become a slaver, but I was made one. By the time I had ten summers behind me, I knew the job well enough to do it on my own. I didn’t know each of them was their own person, a soul, a being with its own destiny and desires, because I did not know that was true of myself.

  It was only when I realized that I was a slave and not a slaver’s apprentice that I understood that what Archie was doing was a great wrong. Right and wrong had no meaning in my life until I was almost a woman. I learned some of it from my father, but he was not a talkative man. I began to understand when I knew the horsewomen, but I could never see it the way they did. They didn’t know what I knew.

  Even when I met Eddy I still didn’t really know. I had not yet made peace with what I had done, or what was done to me. Of course I can’t think about the way I grew up without thinking about Connie. Every Mother I’ve ever met says they didn’t understand their own Mother until they had a child of their own.

  I didn’t know what to do with that for a long time. Every woman says it, so it must have been true. For them. I had no Mother. Whenever I thought about having a child, I thought about that. Where would I learn it, the work of mothering? Mothers were everywhere in Ommun, and I learned some of it there. They were rare in Nowhere and everywhere else, and I saw how it changed people. They became fierce and fearful. They changed their entire being to exist for someone else. Or they didn’t. They each came to understand that they were part of a line of women, back to the old world and whatever began it, of Mothers and daughters back to the first.

  I came from no one and no line. I came from broken and unusual. I came from Archie and, later, my father. I learned how to cherish a child after I was too big to be held. What could I know?

  But Connie wasn’t a baby when they became my child. Maybe that’s why it was so easy for us. I understood them. I loved them at once.

  Here on Bambritch Island, all this seems like it happened to someone else. I can remember it; I can see how it made me into who I am. The line runs through me. If not st
raight to a living child, then to a circle of people here on Bambritch. I have a line the way the Midwife had a line: by making a safe place for people like me.

  I can’t stop thinking about this as the army approaches.

  There is a sound, now, in the night. It whines like a mosquito, but it never comes near. Panic tells me it’s the plane, flying through the night looking for the bright spots of fires. The Bambritch council got together and issued a blackout warning for the island. We decided not to tell people too much, not to panic them. Hortensia, the council’s oldest member, agreed with me immediately. Zill and Eva almost always decide as one, and they were with me. Our planning has been slow—too slow. Carol is the youngest, the one most likely to believe. He believes they have a plane they can fly. He was most eager of all for a blackout rule, believing they might be able to see us from the sky.

  I’m sure they can’t drop bombs from a plane. I’m sure.

  I’ve read about planes in many books. They used to be as common as sheep. People flew every day, covering distances I can’t imagine in only a few hours. They used to ship food and goods through the sky. They used to wage war, dropping bombs and shooting guns from planes. There’s no way to defend against that, if it’s real. There’s nowhere to run. We could maybe shoot it down, if we were lucky, but then it would have to fall somewhere. Maybe in the water, but maybe on our island. That’s hardly better.

  The mosquito sound drones louder, but nothing has been spotted. Watchers on the water are scanning the skies instead of netting the fish that are active only at night. They haven’t seen it. Not yet.

  The lookouts have passed the word that we have only a few more days before the army arrives. We’re going to have to make some decisions, the council and the whole island. What we do will affect us all, and the five of us can’t decide it for everyone.

  I don’t know that I have enough time to tell this story. We won’t be able to gather until dawn, because of the blackout order. But I have only this time, and I cannot think of any better way to spend it.