The woman on the hill was —
‘You’re me, aren’t you?’ Rosie asked. And then, as the woman with the plaited hair shifted slightly, she added in a shrill, shaking voice: ‘Don’t turn around, I don’t want to see!’
‘Don’t jump so fast,’ Rose Madder said in a strange, patient voice. ‘You’re really Rosie, you’re Rosie Real. Don’t forget that when you forget everything else. And don’t forget one other thing: I repay. What you do for me I will do for you. And that’s why we were brought together. That is our balance. That is our ka.’
Lightning ripped the sky; thunder cracked; wind hissed through the olive tree. The tiny blonde hairs which had escaped from Rose Madder’s plait wavered wildly. Even in this chancey light they looked like filaments of gold.
‘Go down now,’ Rose Madder said. ‘Go down and bring me my baby.’
5
The child’s cry drifted up to them like something which had labored here from another continent, and Rosie looked down at the ruined temple, whose perspective still seemed strangely and unpleasantly skewed, with new fear. Also, her breasts had begun to throb, as they had often throbbed in the months following her miscarriage.
Rosie opened her mouth, not sure of the words that would come out, only knowing they would be some sort of protest, but a hand gripped her shoulder before she could speak. She turned. It was the woman in red. She shook her head warningly, tapped her temple again, and pointed down the hill at the ruins.
Rosie’s right wrist was seized by another hand, one as cold as a gravestone. She turned back and realized at the last moment that the woman in the chiton had turned around and was now facing her. Quickly, with confused thoughts of Medusa filling her mind, Rosie cast her eyes down so as not to see the face of the other. She saw the back of the hand gripping her wrist instead. It was covered with a dark gray blotch that made her think of some hovering ocean predator (a manta ray, of course). The fingernails looked dark and dead. As Rosie watched, she saw a small white worm wriggle out from beneath one of them.
‘Go now,’ Rose Madder said. ‘Do for me what I cannot do for myself. And remember: I repay.’
‘All right,’ Rosie said. A terrible, perverse desire to look up into the other woman’s face had seized her. To see what was there. Perhaps to see her own face swimming beneath the dead gray shadows of some ailment that made you crazy even as it ate you alive. ‘All right, I’ll go, I’ll try, just don’t make me look at you.’
The hand let go of her wrist . . . but slowly, as if it would clamp tight again the instant its owner sensed any weakening on Rosie’s part. Then the hand turned and one dead gray finger pointed down the hill, as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had pointed out one particular grave marker to Ebenezer Scrooge.
‘Go on, then,’ Rose Madder said.
Rosie started slowly down the hill, eyes still lowered, watching her bare feet slip through the high, rough grass. It wasn’t until a particularly vicious crack of thunder tore through the air and she looked up, startled, that she realized the woman in the red robe had come with her.
‘Are you going to help me?’ Rosie asked.
‘I c’n only go that far.’ The woman in red pointed toward the fallen pillar. ‘I got what she got, only so far it hasn’t done much more than brush me.’
She held out an arm, and Rosie saw an amorphous pink blotch squirming on her flesh — in her flesh — between the wrist and the forearm. There was a similar one in the cup of her palm. This one was almost pretty. It reminded Rosie of the clover she had found between the floorboards in her room. Her room, the place she had counted on to be her refuge, seemed very distant to her now. Perhaps that was the dream, that whole life, and this was the only reality.
‘Those are the only two I got, at least for now,’ she said, ‘but they’re enough to keep me out of there. That bull would smell me and come running. It’s me it’d come to, but both of us’d get killed.’
‘What bull?’ Rosie asked, mystified and afraid. They had almost reached the fallen pillar.
‘Erinyes. He guards the temple.’
‘What temple?’
‘Don’t waste time with man’s questions, woman.’
‘What are you talking about? What are man’s questions?’
‘Ones you already know the answers to, girl. Come on over here.’
‘Wendy Yarrow’ was standing by the moss-encrusted end segment of the fallen pillar and looking impatiently at Rosie. The temple loomed close by. Looking at it hurt Rosie’s eyes in the same way that looking at a movie screen where the picture had gone out of focus hurt them. She saw subtle bulges where she was sure there were none; she saw folds of shadow which disappeared when she blinked her eyes.
‘Erinyes is one-eyed, and that one eye is blind, but there ain’t nothing wrong with his sense of smell. Is it your time, girl?’
‘My . . . time?’
‘Time of the month!’
Rosie shook her head.
‘Good, because we’d ‘a been done before we was begun if you was. I ain’t, neither, ain’t had no womanblood since the sickness started to show. Too bad, because that blood would be best. Still — ‘
The most monstrous crack of thunder yet split the air open just above their heads, and now icy droplets of rain began to fall.
‘We got to hurry!’ the woman in red told her. ‘Tear off two pieces of your nightgown — a strip for a bandage and a swatch big enough to wrap a stone in with enough left over to tie it up. Don’t argue, and don’t go askin no more questions, neither. Just do it.’
Rosie bent down, took hold of the hem of her cotton nightgown, and tore a long, wide strip up the side, leaving her left leg bare almost all the way to the hip. When I walk, I’m going to look like a waitress in a Chinese restaurant, she thought. She tore a narrower strip from the side of this, and when she looked up, she was alarmed to see that ‘Wendy’ was holding a long and wicked-looking double-sided dagger. Rose couldn’t think where it might have come from, unless the woman had had it strapped to her thigh, like the heroine in one of those sweet-savage Paul Sheldon novels, stories where there was a reason, no matter how farfetched, for everything that happened.
That’s probably just where she had it, too, Rosie thought. She knew that she herself would want a knife if she was traveling in the company of the woman in the rose madder chiton. She thought again about how the woman who was traveling in her company had tapped the side of her head with one finger and told Rosie not to touch her. She don’t mean you no harm,
‘Wendy Yarrow’ had said, but she ain’t got good control of herself no more.
Rosie opened her mouth to ask the woman standing by the fallen pillar what she intended
doing with that knife . . . and then closed her lips again. If a man’s questions were ones you already knew the answers to, then that was a man’s question.
‘Wendy’ seemed to feel her eyes and looked up at her. ‘It’s the big piece you’ll want first,’
she said. ‘Be ready with it.’
Before Rosie could answer, ‘Wendy’ had pierced her own skin with the tip of the dagger.
She hissed a few words Rosie didn’t understand — maybe a prayer — and then drew a fine line across her forearm, one that matched her dress. It fattened and began to run as the skin and underlying tissue drew back, allowing the wound to gape.
‘Oooh, that hurt bad!’ the woman moaned, then held out the hand with the dagger in it.
‘Give it to me. The big piece, the big piece!’
Rosie put it in her hand, confused and frightened but not nauseated; the sight of blood did not do that to her. ‘Wendy Yarrow’ folded the strip of cotton cloth into a pad, which she placed over the wound, held, then turned over. Her purpose did not appear to be compression; she only wanted to soak the cloth with her blood. When she handed it back to Rosie, the cotton which had been cornflower blue when Rosie lay down in her Trenton Street bed was a much darker color . . . but a familiar one. Blue and scarlet had combined to make rose madder.
‘Now find a rock and tie that piece of cloth around it,’ she said to Rosie. ‘When you got that done, take off that thing you’re wearing and wrap it around both.’