“Who are you running from?”
“Those who were coming to kill me and my baby, men who have already probably killed my husband and father . . .”
“Et al,” she whispered hysterically to herself. “Et al . . .” She raised her head to find the hatch closed once more. She waited. After a time she thrust the staff through the loop and clanged again, another measured three.
This time she saw the hatch slide open. “Don’t be impatient. You may enter. The small opening to your left.”
It was a considerable distance to her left, a narrow slot around and behind a great wallowing buttress, like the buttocks of some huge animal that had stood forever, pushing up the wall. The passage did not extend through the wall but only into the buttress itself, a slot that only a slender person might traverse, a child, a woman, a young man without arms or armor. She took two steps and a metal grille moved behind her, closing the entrance and leaving her standing in a iron caged space so tight she could not spread her arms. Stone circled her except for the grille at her back and another at her left where a lantern was held by an invisible hand. A woman’s voice, perhaps the same voice, said, “Take off your clothing. All of it.”
“This is not hospitable,” she said, suddenly furious. “This is whatthey no doubt wanted of me, that I be naked and helpless.”
A laugh, without humor. “Woman, you do not know them if you believe that, and as for us, we have no designs on your body. We do need to assure that you carry nothing to our hurt, but you may choose. If you like, we will open the grille and you may go out the way you came.”
Fighting tears, she leaned her staff against the stone and took off the hooded robe with its porous, insulated helmet that kept the sun from frying the brain, then the under-robe Awhero had given her. Finally, with some struggle, she removed the silken bodysuit that covered her from throat to below her elbows and knees, laminated to her belly and thighs by the dried breast milk.
“How old is your child?” someone asked. A softer voice. Not so crisp.
“Almost a month,” she said, gulping tears. “His name is Dovidi.”
“Sandals, too,” said the first voice. “And stockings. Put everything through that hole by your foot.”
The lantern wagged, showing her the gap in the grille, large enough to put shoes or wadded clothing through.
“Turn around, slowly.”
She turned, holding her hands out, away from her body. She heard whispers.
“. . . one of the intended . . .”
“. . . all nonsense, look at that unmistakable nose . . .”
“. . . rather as we had been told?”
After a long pause, her outer robe came back, and she wrapped it around herself.
“Where did you get these sandals?” someone asked. Where had she got them? “I was told they were a gift,” she said. “From the wives of the Shah. So that I could walk with them in their garden. My own shoes were . . . what do they say?” For a moment she couldn’t remember the caste word and substituted another. “Befouled?”
“Arghaste. That is the Mahahmbi word. It means ‘soiled by being foreign,’ that is, from originating elsewhere than Mahahm. You yourself are arghaste, while the untouchables are malghaste, soiled by birth. In addition, you are evighaste, soiled by being a woman. Even wearing Mahahmbi shoes, you would not have been allowed to walk in their garden. It was a ruse, a ploy. Something, perhaps, to gain time.”
“But I had walked in their garden,” she cried. “I’d been there before!”
Silence. Ominous. Gathering.
Then another voice. “Describe the occasion. Where? Who did you meet?”
“1 don’t know where. A walled place, not too far from the house we rented. There were three of them, the Shah’s wives they said. They were all new mothers, and one of them said . . . they’d earned the right to go … to paradise. To Galul.”
A long silence, then very softly: “What did they look like?”