Every day she has to stretch and stretch and stretch to keep her legs straightening, stretch and stretch to stop her shins curving, stretch and stretch like she thinks she was told to, before she came to the sister-refuge, but she doesn't remember, stretch to chase the cramp down to the ends of her toes, stretch to force the cramp out of her toes and into the air, and stretch to tear apart the knots in the muscles of her thighs and calves and make the muscles tender again, soft like the flesh of the dirt-snake-fish she stroked that time.
She stretches almost to the end of the bed, and she wonders if the beds the sisters-in-charge sleep on are twice as big as hers, or if they have to curl up twice as tight.
She gazes at the trees through the uncurtained windows, down past the curve of her leg that is just like a giant flattened version of the hook the sisters-in-charge use to catch the clean-fish from the clean-stream for the meals and she looks at the skin of her leg and she sees the hairs are still there, and the hairs have grown more in the night. She is sure she can see light glowing away from her big toe, pointing into the forest. She moves her lower leg to hook over the stretching one and force it down, to make things straighter faster. The light seems to dim. The branches of the trees straggle back and seem to be pulling her vision away, seem to be forming two vees pointing back to somewhere in the deepness of the forest too far away to see and too far away as well to really exist until the future arrives. She looks up over her shoulder at the body of the anti-shaper-spirit drowned-kitten indulgence. Its body is still drying up, cracking, and flaking away, dripping solidly and slowly to the floor from the nail holding the ribbon tied round its neck to the bedhead, just as it has been doing since the ceremony. She looks at the blue-and-white unevenly patterned ribbon, but she knows she isn't allowed to untie it, just as she has always known she isn't allowed to give the kitten a name, because it won't work any longer if she does.
The tiredness seeps. She jolts into her day-sleep. There are two vee-shaped slashes of dark across the white blinding before everything goes into darkness.
...and then what there is is the sound of her own voice again and what it says is "Welcome again, my darling-child. You will soon be with me, my darling-child. Your anti-shaper-spirit drowned-kitten indulgence is running out, as you have seen, and when it does, you will then have finished the waiting period, which is the time that the sisters who are in charge of you secretly call "shaper purgatory" and when you have served your waiting apprenticeship, you will be mine again, and my wait will be over. That is something for you to look forward to, my darling-child: let me promise you that. But there is a thing you must do for yourself, first: you must fetch the knife. You know that you have to fetch the knife and you know why. And when you have fetched the knife, you will be able to help me as well"...
She falls awake. She starts to breathe again. The pillow is pink from the day-sleep blood-tears again. What she now has to call the absent-parent-knife-scar is itching. She looks at it. She dips her finger in its deep crescent cut bumping up like a second navel on her stomach. She looks at the small pool of liquid inside it that is clear, not red. She smells her finger. Sniffs at the memory of the knife she has never seen. Knows it belongs to her. Knows it will need to be used, but not what for. But now she knows she can smell it out and reclaim it.
She looks up, and out into the forest again. The vee-shapes vibrate slightly, as if they – or some other things - are listening.
She lets her legs fall to the side of the bed, and she drops down to the floor. She puts her hand into the bread-pocket inside her cloak, and checks there are some black-bread crumbs inside. She picks up her skin-parcel from where it is hanging on the bedhead and hangs it round her neck from its ribbon.
In the corridor, she eases past the sister who used to be known as "Frenzy" who is not in her frenzy now, but in her silence, so she has been left inside, and not made to do the dancing lessons outside, and she is squatting, staring at the wall, her lips kissing and straightening, and the rest of her taking no notice.
She walks past the open entrance to the under-sister dormitory she now can't go into and the closed entrance to the returned-sister dormitory she has never been allowed into and she leaves by the side door, so there is no sister-in-charge to say "safe journey in the mouth of the beast" to her. She waddles a bit, like she always does after her exercises, then she straightens up and begins to walk properly, as the pain spreads more evenly.
She walks a short distance away from the sister-refuge, then starts to skirt around it. She hears the long-pipe being blown for the end of the dancing lesson. She glances back at the building. Behind it she can see the forest start to straggle away and to the side she can see the muddy lane all the sisters arrived along although she can't remember coming along it with who she now has to call the parent-who-brought-her. She looks at the thin, overlapping wooden tiles on the wall. A few of them are prising away in the breeze then dropping back. The thatch is fraying a little, and tossing in the wind. The high coldness of the place seems to reach out to her, and she shivers in the thinness of her cloak.
She skirts the lumped terrain, meandering to avoid the domain of the swamp oaf, until she is forced by the Rocks of the Iron Battle Beast to sneak through the narrow passage of the safe area next to the corner of his domain, because the muscles in her legs are still too soft from the exercises to let her climb them.
...and then what there is is the lament-snarl of the swamp oaf, steaming out from his swamp of no seasons, calling out to her in his usual voice that is the thing called 'falsetto' and that sounds as if it has been created by licking up the rustling of the smallest leaves and the cracking of the smallest branches to make the snapping treble voice-noises he sends out as he says "please come to me" and "please feel the sticky tentacles of my swamp love" and "please feel my desire in the particles of the air" and "please comfort me in my imprisonment" and then what there is is nothing but a high drone like the squeal sometimes made by the sisters-in-charge with their clean-water glasses and the drone is pulling her towards him like the sucking of the slide of the mud that happens when the wet weather grips...
But her legs strengthen and she pushes herself away and her eyelids seem to freeze together in the breathed out voice-moisture but she knows she has to get the knife and she knows where it is and she scrapes through the undergrowth of the safe area, through the scabrous broom, the purge and the pelt-blight, feeling the rustling noising through her ears, and feeling the scratch of the claw-gorse blood-biting her skin, and ducking underneath the line of ribbons joining the trees at the edge of the safe area, knowing she is allowed to do so now, even though she's done it lots of times before, and she realises that what she is ducking under is her own blue-and-white ribbon she has never seen before and it is tied to join what she has heard is called the Oak of the Beast Within and what she has heard is called the Oak of the False Prophet Without and the Oak of the False Prophet Without has a mutilated shape because someone has taken all the top branches away, so it looks like a punishment-glove with the fingers cut short, and she feels the air flinch suddenly colder as she steps inside the two circles of the figure eight made by the constant march of the trickle-beetles scratching around the bases of the two trunks, and she sees the brown powder shavings appearing as the trickle-beetles bite in and carry on, and she steps out of the figure eight herself and also carries on, pulling her cloak around her, feeling the cold like a splattering of mist particles.
And the wind gets stopped, and she feels the familiar delayed temporary infection that often comes from what is called 'exposure' to the lament of the swamp oaf and that torrents in as soon as she has crossed the line-of-safety, and she feels her nose streaming and she feels as if the weather is pressing her from above, as it spits and buffets around her, and she picks her nose like she has been told not to, and she sees the blood flecked inside the snot and sees the fleck slowly merging with the background to a stain like the pinking on the pillowcase, and she walks past what she knows is the tree of night-eye blood-berries even though it is bare, and she sees the branches shake in the wind's absence, and then what there is is a voice from the tree that is her own voice again, and it is saying "Only you can free me," but she knows she has to ignore the voice and carry on to where the knife is, because she can smell the knife solidly now, and she knows the unfamiliar way to go to reach it.
A day-bat swoops down and swipes its selection from the circle of day-moths and hover-bees swirling above the peak of her hood.
...and then what there is is the return of the high straining voice of the swamp oaf making its imprint on her and wrapping around every tiny piece of the air and saying "Goodbye for now but I know you will be back and I shall wait because all I do is wait so please think of me even though I can not remember your destiny but please do not forget me and do not forgot who you are"...
She flicks the bloodied snot away, and carries on.
She remembers something: a conversation.
"Sister, why am I called 'Injury'?"
"This is your given name. It is not your parent-name. The parent-who-brought-you tried to tell us your parent-name, but we did not listen, as is our standard practice. But soon, you will not have that name either."
"But that doesn't explain why I am called 'Injury'."
"Please do not talk to me in that fashion. You are called 'Injury' because of the scar inflicted by your absent-parent. We do not know why it is there but we do not ask those sorts of questions of the parents-who-bring-children – they do not affect what we do here. We treat all children evenly. We merely chose a name to identify you by."
And she pushes beneath the cobweb-moss hanging from the branches, and comes out in the clearing where the hut is, and she sees it is of wood, covered in soil and turf, like the others, and she sees the dried grass fringing the windows vibrate slightly in the resonance, and just before she enters the hut she hears snoring, and she creeps into the single room of the hut where the bearded man lies in a bed at the far end. She looks at him sleeping. She goes up to him. She puts her ear to his mouth, and feels the breath. She can see his breath. It is almost red, and spiralling through the dusty air. She puts her tongue into the curls of breath. She whispers into the breath, not into his ear: "Are you my father? Are you my absent parent?" The breath does not reply, and becomes invisible again. She looks under his pillow, and finds the knife where she knew it would be, and she wraps it up in her skin-parcel, and turns to escape.
...and then what there is is the feel of arms around her, crushing her backwards to a thick body and the sweat-smell of both affection and an angry grunting at the pitch the sisters-in-charge-of-music call 'baritone'...
But when she looks down, there is nothing there, and she struggles against the weight to turn herself around and she looks at the man, and he is still sleeping, and she staggers out of the hut, with the phantom arms still crushing her in to an invisible body, and she drags the arms and the body with her back into the forest, and she hears the sudden snapped aggression of a thicket- wren, deep in the growth beside her, and she fights to unearth some black-bread crumbs from the bread-pocket to feed the thicket-wren and silence its livid chatter and as soon as the black-bread crumbs hit the soil, the arms release her and seem to just evaporate away and then she feels the blood suddenly gushing from both of her nostrils then just as suddenly stopping, and then the arms are gone away completely and are nowhere near but a gentle choking replaces it like tiny hands inside her throat and the thicket-wren pecks the crumbs down and she thinks she is close to where the brother-refuge ought to be and she looks up and she thinks she sees a boy, running away, and the boy seems to have no hair at all.
And she herself runs away, but towards the boy, with the skin-parcel bouncing from her neck, and the ground suddenly becomes drier and then suddenly wetter. And the boy has disappeared, and she sees he was the other side of a moat, which she can now see is squaring-in the brother-refuge and making a barrier because there is too much water there. She goes up to the moat, and kneels and looks into it, and it is as clear as the clean-stream, at the point where it is about to water the mud of the swamp, and she thinks back to the ceremony.
She remembers holding her breath as strong fingers immersed her head. She remembers the water of the clean-stream clinging like mud because it was so cold and the voice that was her own voice talking to her inside her own head and saying "Drown your brain. Drown your brain in this freezing water. Let your thought-cells come back to me." She remembers being handed the towel.
A flock of dry-gulls fly over and each one is trying to beak-stab the wings of the others. A single spot of white falls onto the back of her active hand, but nothing falls into the water. She looks back into the water. She can see what they say is called her reflection, and her reflection looks the same as the one in the clean-stream. There are no clean-fish in the water. There is nothing but her reflection.
She remembers that, later, when it was just before she opened her skin-parcel, when she was clutching it and staring at the familiar ribbon, her head was still buzzing and bubbling from the running freeze of the water and she could still smell the acrid metallic tinge of minerals in her hair.
A flock of swamp-rooks fly over and splatter their noise into the far treetops. She looks into the water again. Her reflection winks at her, but she has not moved her eye-muscles.
She remembers sitting in the assembly room, in a circle formed by her and the other five, facing outwards. She remembers the voice of the sister-in-charge-of-the-sisters-in-charge they had never seen coming from the curtained bell-tent of fabric in the middle of the room so it was behind all of them. The voice of the sister-in-charge-of-the-sisters-in-charge was old so it wobbled just like the thing they called "vibrato" in the singing lessons and was the thing they weren't allowed to do. "Sisters, now that you have reached the age of agreement, now that you have your skin-parcels, now that you have been washed in the stream from the pool of sisterhood, you are in the time of the second passage. Please now open your skin-parcels."
She looks in the water. Her reflection is not there. There is now only a single red twisting thread in the clean water. She jumps up, turns around, and runs away.
She remembers opening the skin-parcel, bound with the same blue-and-white unevenly patterned ribbon she recognised from her other two, the one she tied her hair with, and the one that was tied around the neck of her anti-shaper-spirit drowned-kitten indulgence to keep it to the bedhead. She remembers removing the cloak. It was also blue and white and uneven in pattern. She read the label. It said "Cloud-Splashed Sky."
She rounds the corner, shin-scratched, and hard-breathing, clutching the knife in the skin-parcel to her chest. The choking is still in her throat.
She remembers the voice again. "You have now been cloak-birthed, sisters. This is an important stage for you. You need to keep your cloaks safe, sisters, away from the prising hands of others in this place. Each one belongs to you, and no other."
There is something traversing her. A line of warmth. A horizontal trickle inside her. A faint itching on the skin to match it. Something is moving inside again. Things are shifting. Incomprehensible speech bubbles through her like air in the blood and then subsides away.
She remembers hearing the sister-in-charge-of-the-sisters-in-charge speaking again. "Each of your patterns is unique, and is registered. You were assigned one at the time that you were brought here. What you need to understand, sisters, is that there are six ribbons in total, all the same colour and pattern as that of your new cloak. One is retained within the portfolio of patterns stored in the library. One was given to the parent-who-brought-you, to allow us to identify you, should they come back to claim you. One was used to contribute to the marking of the trees that comprise the safe zone. You may have seen it. This means that the whole safe area can be considered an avenue of memory, sister: a living history of the sisters who have lived here, and what became of them, written in the language of ribbons and trees. As to two of the other three ribbons, you are aware of them already. So now you have a sixth one, and this allows you to reuse the skin-parcel for whatever purpose you choose. However, you are strictly forbidden to give it away to anybody else."
As she reaches, the night-eye blood-berry tree, its trunk seems to swell and pulse a bit. And then what there is is her own voice saying "Waiting. Waiting."
She remembers hearing the sister-in-charge-of-the-sisters-in-charge speaking again. "You must wear your cloak at all times when you are not in bed. It is your badge of identification. That is why they are thin, because they are also to be worn in summer. There are no linings for them, I am afraid, sisters, so you must still dress warmly in winter."
The hairs on her shins are itching, like muted hover-bee stings. She throws herself under her own ribbon and rolls over, crushing some of the trickle-beetles at the base of the Oak of the Beast Within and the base of the Oak of the False Prophet Without into more brown powder shavings. The choked feeling seems to evaporate, and she runs along further.
She remembers a smell of mustiness coming from the curtain, like the same smell of mustiness that came from the learning books and that always reminded her of the smell of rotting that came from the amputated and discarded cocks' claws in the Iron Battles hollow in the centre of the forest near to the empty building that was surrounded by ash and had nothing growing near it as the sister-in-charge-of-the-sisters-in-charge continued. "Sisters, when you came here, you were named and you were baptised. Now that you have reached the appropriate age, and we all have reached the winter solstice, you have been cloak-birthed. The names that we gave you when you came to us will remain your names, but you will no longer be known by them - you will from henceforth be known only as ‘sister’. Please remember that from now on you must speak first to, rather than be spoken to by, any of the older sisters who work here. This reflects your status. This is one of your new responsibilities. There are standards to observe, which have been written down and given to you. Since you are all now able to read, this document will be binding on your behaviour. Furthermore, from now on, there are no places in the forest forbidden to you. However, this does not mean that there are no places that you ought to avoid, merely that the dangers have been explained to you – and some very severe dangers they are - so the decisions are yours. If you are missing, we shall not come looking for you, sisters, please be sure of that. As you know, we search for the young ones below the age of agreement who are still addressed by their given names, but only within the boundaries of the safe area. We shall not even look for you within the safe area. This is an indication of the status that you have now attained."
She walks past the upside down tree on the edge of a bank with the black ribbons on its roots. The choking has turned to an ache down the passive side of her head.
She remembers picking up the cloak. It was unlined; lightweight; flimsy.
She is near the domain of the swamp oaf again.
…and then what there is is a silence, but a silence made up of tiny creaks of silence, creaks of silence waiting…
She remembers hearing the sister-in-charge-of-the-sisters-in-charge speaking again. "You are now newly unnamed, sisters. You have been newly unnamed to allow you to progress to the next stage. After a further year, you will be assigned to your apprenticeships. You will then either stay with your master or mistress or return here to work. Remember, sisters, that we have passed the solstice, and therefore that the weather is now getting older, because a new year has begun. At some point in this year, your anti-shaper-spirit drowned-kitten indulgences will fail to work, so from then on, you need to be more vigilant. Now let us say our prayer." And altogether they said "Please keep the spirits that shape me to their evil purposes away. Please make them crumble to the soil of your forest."
She is now near the pudding trees, and there is a carpet of dead crunchy brown leaves.
She remembers hearing the sister-in-charge-of-the-sisters-in-charge speaking again. "Please put on your cloaks now, sisters."
She knows the pudding tree is also called a spike-beech tree and she knows fragments of the leaves will keep flaking away months after they'd died when they're finally released from the branches, until the equalisation of spring, which is a quarter of a year away, flake away like bits of what she tries to remember, so some go away and some stay and something gives in and releases them to the ground, and she feels like she is falling into the carpet of leaves, reaching out for her mother. When they are all gone, the swamp oaf will be silent.
She remembers seeing her own breath rising just like the steam from the latrine pile. She remembers putting on the cloak for the first time. It had shivered, and danced around her shoulders. She remembers feeling an iciness of evaporation, as if it were drawing the heat out of her, even though she was already as cold as she could ever remember being, with her hair still wet from the ceremony. She remembers pulling the cloak around her further: it felt slightly sticky.
She checks her shins. They are even hairier. She checks her calves and they are even hairier too. She knows what to look for, even though she doesn't know why, and she looks for any of the pudding trees having foam berries clinging on them as the things that are called parasites, but none of them has got any in the safe area, so she walks to the line of ribbons again and ducks under again, and she enters the part of the foam tree clearing that is within the domain of the swamp oaf. It is both warmer and colder. It is like steam made from ice.
She sees a vee of dead trees pointing away from her, and each tree has a wild boar's beheading indulgence stuffed with arrow heads perched on top of it to ward off the shaper-spirits of the forest, just like the bodies of the drowned kittens do indoors, just as she has been told in her lessons. The vee leads her to a new brownery of pudding trees, and all the branches are covered by foam-berries, and all the berries are covered by lice.
She grabs some handfuls of berries, returns with them, ducks back under the ribbon, and settles into the soft warmth of what the sisters-in-charge-of-science had called a "hibernaculum". There is no breeze where she is, but near the swamp, she can see the down is blowing off the milk-rushes horizontally in the wind.
She rubs the berries between her hands and clasps the foam to her palms, hoping the swamp oaf won't know she's there.
The foam is ticklish and burns slightly. As she applies the foam, her headache subsides. The lice are still in the foam. She takes out the knife. The blade is as curved as her shins. She moves it up and down within the foam and she notices small liquid scabs of pinkness saturating into the whiteness of the foam, just like the pillowcase after the day-sleep, and she can feel little skin-grabs of burn-pain, and she can feel herself smiling. She reaches for a clump of spider sorrel, tears some of the leaves away, and wipes the foam off with them. The leaves are moist and green, even in the fading snow.
...and then what there is is the voice of the swamp oaf again, faint, as if blown back by a breeze, saying "please remember your veteran admirer - please remember your failed friend who didn't grow to manhood..."
She shivers, and shrinks back into herself. A damselfly flutters down and sticks in the foam. A gift-frog appears.
The damselfly escapes itself from the foam. The gift-frog hops further away.
She looks at the dried-up splodges of red and, as an experiment, makes a tiny nick on the calf of the other leg. She watches the flower of blood spread. She allows the blade to hover over a different area, then puts it down, and she can feel her lips smiling and then she can feel her lips forming the word "stupid" but she doesn't say the word out loud.
The bleeding soon stops. She separates the hairs from the remains on the foam and carefully puts them in the other pocket of the cloak. She looks down into the pocket of her cloak. She knows the foam will evaporate. The lice undissolve through the discarded foam and scurry away to their places of hiding.
She casts aside the husks of the berries into a small pile. They start to fizz straight away and turn to a gas that looks like smoke. The damselfly flies over them and shrinks into a flapping weakness and only just escapes the gift-frog.
She tests the blade against her finger. It is now blunt. She puts the knife in the skin-parcel. She makes sure the ribbon is tied tight. She buries the bag in the soft ground of the hibernaculum. It is already getting dark. She wraps herself up in her cloak again and scurries away, back to the refuge, just like the lice. She knows she has to read a lot to catch up on the lessons she's missed. She feels the lining of the cloak thickening as she runs. She wonders what will happen next.
She sneaks into the sister-refuge, goes into the dormitory and lies down on her bed. The other sisters are already asleep. The sister who used to be called "Frenzy" is chattering without her voice in her sleep, and her teeth are making the rhythm that is called "three-time" in the music lessons. Her pillow is sharp-white in the glooming of the sudden moon. There is enough moonlight to read by. She knows she needs to catch up. She puts her pillow at the foot of the bed, and lies down, with the window behind her, and the moonlight over her shoulder and the anti-shaper-spirit drowned-kitten indulgence clearly visible whenever she looks away from her book.
She tries to read, but the book is getting heavy. So are her eyes.
She can hear her own voice, nuzzling its words into all the chambers of her ears with no breaking and no stopping.
...and then what there is is the sound of her own voice again and what it says is "Darling-child can you hear me darling-child do not be alarmed with my voice because I speak in your voice because I have lost my old voice and I have not had the strength to get it back yet with the weakening from the inheritance of poison from what I have been forced to eat but now I am in your dream and I am with you in your child-sleep and I am getting stronger now so now I can visit you in your night-sleep which means I am inside you and I am of you darling-child I am waiting for you and soon you will feel the poison kiss of my eyes so stay sleepful darling-child stay sleepful so I can howl the kindness of my venom into your crescent scar that reflects the moon and it is kindness darling-child please believe me because it will strengthen me and weaken you and so allow us to be reunited so do not you resist me darling-child for if you do your eyes will bleed again and next time they will not stop and the pillow will go red not pink in the night as well as the day because now your anti-shaper-spirit drowned-kitten indulgence is drying up and flaking away so before long it will have no power and your shaper-purgatory will soon be over and then you will be able to join me"...
Her own voice stops, and she feels she is being swallowed whole. She is as small as the nailed body of the anti-shaper-spirit drowned-kitten indulgence and she is inside the stomach of a creature.
She falls awake. She is already breathing. The burst-strength moon is doing the thing called skulking behind clouds just the same way that she does the thing called skulking when they have to do their physical exercises so it is still night but it is also almost late. The pinking from the day-sleep blood-tears has disappeared and the pillow is white again. Some of the sisters are snoring, but they can because it is her chore-day today, not theirs. Together, their troubled-air-breathing makes a sound like the rattling of dried twigs, just like the call of the swamp oaf. She hears the sound of crying from the younger, newer children in the dormitory along the corridor. She feels something inside her being released, being choked out, like her body is growling and spitting out what it doesn't like. She is still the wrong way round on the bed. She crawls over, reaches up and tries to touch the anti-shaper-spirit drowned-kitten, but is not there, because it has crumbled to nothing and there is only the ribbon tied to the bed, and a pile of dust on the floor. This is what they call "ambition" in the life lesson, because something has happened that has been waited for.
She does her exercises. As she finishes, she can feel the triggering inside her. She looks down. The hairs are starting to sprout again: she knows she needs to scrape them off. She wraps her cloak around her, puts on her boots and goes out. Something inside the cloak tickles her.
The sister who used to be known as Frenzy is in her frenzy again and she is dancing on her heels and spitting and crying in the corridor and slapping the air with the backs of her hands and shrieking and every shriek is visible as a curl in her breath-steam that screams out all the time as she sings:
"Hair-shins, hair-shins,
Flesh made of beast skins
Your mother was a drifter
And your father was a shifter
So you suffered for their sins
So you're a pair of fused twins."
Flesh made of beast skins
Your mother was a drifter
And your father was a shifter
So you suffered for their sins
So you're a pair of fused twins."
She knows there is no talking to her when she is in her frenzy because she doesn't understand and she knows there is no talking to her afterwards because she doesn't remember, so she just puts her little fingers in her ears, and keeps on walking up the corridor that she had to clean in her underwear that time as a non-latrine punishment, goes past the classroom and past the reading room and past the music room and she goes out to do her chores.
She stops to see what in the cloak is tickling her. She sees her cloak is thickening now with hairs that are somehow hooked inside the lining.
Outside, the moon is starting to disappear itself, and the sun is flaking through, but weakly.
She is now carrying out her task for the morning and feeding the chickens. She has swilled down her black bread with clean-water, but she has not eaten her breakfast honey, because her stomach hurts and too much sweetness makes it worse.
A smell of cooking field-cabbage is coming out of the open window. She remembers the sister-in-charge's words: "Make sure that you count the eggs, sister. The beasts will steal anything when it's this cold – they will even eat the frozen gift-frogs in the wood." The chicken coop smells like something bitter-smelling has invaded in a cloud to take someone away, but the eggs are all there.
She checks the bread-pocket of the cloak – it is empty. She sees no one in the kitchen, and goes in and takes two more slices, which she puts in the bread-pocket of her cloak, uncrumbled.
She feels a blanket of acid waft through her stomach again. She remembers something. From long ago. A time and a voice:
"Injury, my child, please do not do that again. You must remember that we believe only in cleanliness within these four walls, which is why we have no facilities inside to deal with the transport of body-filth. The latrine pile is available to all at any time of the day or night. The slurry will be taken away to the swamp in its own time. The clean stream is available to wash your hands in. Please ensure that you wash your hands in the clean stream at a lower point than the well from where we take the drinking water because it is believed that part of the clean stream falls into it. You will need to walk through the scabrous broom thicket, but that is always safe. Everybody always does this, and always does this in good time."
She puts her hand into the bread-pocket of her cloak and mashes the two slices of black bread to crumbs. She feels happier now the pocket is full, but she doesn't know why. She counts every hundred paces, and drops a crumb. The other pocket – the hair-pocket – is empty.
She walks towards the latrine pile, guided by the permanent mauve glow. Three swamp-ravens fly over. The ash from the discarded building where nothing grows is still too frozen to blow in the wind.
She clambers up the path up its side. She feels the warmth and sees the glow. A few girls are zigging and zagging across the steep side of the pile. They are silent, as required, because they need to concentrate, but the silence is a noisy silence, and seems to swell the poison in the air. At the far end, a sister-in-charge has just finished, and is bundling up her skirts, adjusting her apron, and departing.
She climbs part of the way up. She passes white roots like bones. She kicks away some of the roots like bones and squats. She splays the ground with her water. She looks down, and sees a perfect circle of pure wetness, which breaks up and steams down the part-way of the hill. She erupts two turds at the same time. Linked into a vee. Pointing down the hill. Trickle-beetles come out of the unfrozen crust of the frozen soil to investigate them. They smell like clean-fish and field-cabbage gone old. They are what is called 'expulsions'.
The pelt-blight is growing almost everywhere, in a giant vee, in the only place it could outside the domain of the swamp oaf at this time of the year and this age of the weather.
The only tracks are from their boots and from the feet of the gift-frogs. There were no other creatures coming here other than the birds and the insects. The gift-frogs have picked around the turds in the way that is called 'fastidious'.
She looks over. She sees the pelt-blight. The damselflies are feeding on the nectar from its blue wrinkled cowls. She sees the damselflies being sucked down and then slewing around crookedly, addled on the pelt-blight poison nectar. She sees the gift-frogs leaping on the poisoned damselflies and grazing on them.
A heavy quartet of angel-herons flies over. The gases in the air seem to thicken to support them. She knows if they land and eat the poisoned gift-frogs, they will never move again, but she also knows no one will notice. The frogs jump away from the herons down the slope into the domain of the swamp oaf.
She walks to the top, and gazes over into the domain of the swamp oaf. She sees everything magnified. She sees the gift-frogs enter the domain of the swamp oaf, and stop, seconds after they have crossed the line of ribbons.
And she feels herself inside the coat of another, picking its tangled way through the trees of the domain of the swamp oaf, each step a blob of cold pain, and she feels its frozen, hungry despair, and she sneaks up on the gift-frog lying still in the hibernaculum, and she knows there is no need to sneak up but she does so anyway.
And she knows the gift-frog is not dead, but not breathing either. She knows it is frozen, in spite of the absence of seasons.
She feels herself taking it with one mouth-swipe, crunching it down with the feeling they call 'exultation' in the spiritual lessons, so the gift-frog slimes down inside her - the skin and the unbeating heart and the unfrozen vital organs - and she drinks in the cold explosion of ice crystals beneath its skin, feeling the released rush from all the sugary richness in its organs, ingesting them all in a warm-throat thaw and then a warm-gut thaw too late for the gift-frog but not too late for the pelt-blight-poison to leach out of the gift-frog and into her-as-the-predator. And she can feel it coming into her. And she can feel the poison-predator starting to form, starting to take over her-as-host. And she as the poison-predator feels it's the tingling heat of the poison flowing through her that keeps her alive and not blood because blood is no use anymore.
She falls awake. She starts to breathe again. She is still squatting. She can smell her own expulsions again. She wipes the backs of her hands across her eyes again, and the wet dirt is pink-streaked again. She walks to a patch of spider sorrel next to the pelt-blight. She grabs some leaves and wipes herself. She throws the patch of dirty leaves onto the two expulsion turds in the shape of a vee that are now completely scuttled with trickle-beetles.
She walks to the top, and gazes over into the domain of the swamp oaf. It gets colder as she climbs. She knows because she has not taken her breakfast honey, things will soon start to freeze inside her once she has left the pile. She can feel the sugar draining away from her organs and the melted ice forming crystals in her skin again. She sees nothing. She goes back down the slope to wash her hands in the clean-stream.
Her shins are tickling as she moves into the coppice, and the wind is growling through the brushwood as she picks her way through it.
She steps over the various intervals of the stepping stones over the slurry outfall. One of them gives beneath her feet slightly, and sucks down into the slurry, making a sound the same pattern as the swamp oaf's lament-snarl, but much lower: what they call in the music lessons a pedal bass. She stands on the middle stepping stone and watches the slurry oozing down from the latrine pile. It is clear but has lots of riches in it - dense, brown goodness with little possessions the girls had swallowed earlier and let come out in their explusions later. She can see the shapes of faces in some of them. Two dirt-snake-fish wriggle into sight then flick away. She can see their fins. She tries to imagine the face of who she now has to call the parent-who-brought-her, but the flecks of matter flock together to form a different face, one belonging to a different sort of head: one where every part is lengthened.
Further into the forest, the ice-beast is melting into unrecognisability, only its four stout legs remaining. The weather is no warmer and no colder than before.
She moves to the pool-stream. The air is no cleaner and no dirtier than before. She looks at the pool-stream. The stream curves, then straightens, then curves again. The stream looks like it is shaped for wanting to jump – not in the air, but along where it is going, like a gift-frog unable to leave the ground – so it can get there more quickly. The shape of the stream seems to twitch a little, and water gulps briefly over the stepping stones.
She dips her hands into the cold water to wash them. A clean-fish tracks by. She plunges her fingers lower and catches it. She smacks its head on a rock and leaves it lying. She cups her hands into the water and drinks. She picks up the clean-fish and moves away.
She can feel the individual hairs of the lining tickling through the pores of her skin of her bared lower arms, as if they are creeping into her and injecting something warm and tingling. She winds sideways through the forest, through the new-growth brush stroking her and tickling her legs like she thinks a father would do with a newly arrived child and she feels the forest starting to fit around her like a skin-parcel. She wraps her cloak more tightly around her.
And in the clearing, she doesn't see anything, but what do appear are giant, splayed mush-impressions vaguely there in the melting snow, and then the cold air seems to trawl and twist in the wake of the heat of an invisible tongue, and the pollen on the tree forms itself into impressions of ground-viper neck-markings on a head that is not so much unseen as not really there and that wheels away and recedes, and then all that stays with her is the stench of a thwarted hunger slowly trailing away. She falls awake. She starts to breathe again. She is still standing. She wipes the backs of her hands across her eyes, and the wet dirt is pink-streaked.
She reaches inside the hole for the skin-parcel containing the knife. She knows it will be there, even though she can smell the land-spraint smell of crumbled dirt moved by paws. She pulls it out. She undoes the ribbon and unearths the knife. She unsoils it on the inside of her cloak. The lining of the cloak seems to sigh as she does so. The knife is sharp again. The rules and regulations paper is still there, still unread.
She checks inside to see how many berries there are, and knows she needs to get some more.
…and then what there is is the call of the lament-snarl of swamp oaf: a long, called-out wordless drone that is not male and not female. Even though there are no words, she can feel all the notes of the call within her like bubbles in her blood…
Waves of scabrous broom months away from its yellowing smack and stroke her face, like claw-gorse with its spikes removed but its spite still intact.
She knows in the domain of the swamp oaf it will be both harder and easier to keep her footing, because the sky is always cloudy although it never rains or snows because something in the domain of the swamp oaf keeps the weather at bay. And the sun is always there but never out, and the moon is always out but is never at its burst-strength.
And then she sees the man she had taken the knife from. The air thickens towards the man, as if the invisible beast is looking at him, then the shape in the air from the invisible beast seems to look at her, then nose away. The man has moved behind a tree. When she reaches the tree, he is not there.
She passes by the wind harp they built for the equalisation of autumn and which is still vibrating from the trees, its strings made of rubbery-like dried saliva sending out a sharp blurring of indefinite notes that are called "chromatic" in the music lessons.
She closes her eyes and opens them. Wisps of red are threading through the air. Waves of dusted air seemed to ripple over her and ruffle the cloak.
She remembers something. A scrap of conversation. It seems to snag on the breeze and hang there. As was required, she spoke first.
"Greetings, sister."
"Greetings, sister. You have something to say to me?"
"Yes, sister."
"Please continue, sister."
"Please indulge my question, sister."
"Please proceed."
"Please tell me, sister: now that I am a sister, why am I still not allowed to know about my mother?"
"Sister, we do not recognise that term. All parents of sisters, under-sisters and returned-sisters are referred to as 'the parent': either 'the parent-who-brought-you' or 'your absent parent'."
"Well, could you please tell me where the parent-who-brought-me is now?"
"No, we can not, sister. The parent-who-brought-you brought you and left you and we usually never hear from the parents who bring the under-sisters here again unless they come back to claim the sister or under-sister whom they left, which happens on very few occasions. It is not our mission to pry into the business of the parents, sister, merely to ensure that the sisters and the under-sisters themselves are properly taken care of. However, I can tell you that the parent-who-brought-you arrived from the depths of the forest, not along the lane that most parents-who-bring-sisters use to arrive here, that the parent-who-brought-you insisted upon leaving you here, whether we liked it or not: the parent-who-brought-you was most emphatic on that point. We suspected that you had been drugged to keep you in a lack of knowledge as to what the intentions of your parent was or your parents were. The parent-who-brought-you said that you were asleep because you had eaten some berries. The parent-who-brought-you had heard that we had ballots here so that the parents-who-brought-children had to pick out a ball from a set of balls constructed from the filed-down joint-sockets of sheep and the parent-who-brought-you refused to do this and insisted upon leaving you here. We informed the parent-who-brought-you that we had no ballots here and that we would take you but that there were formalities that the parent-who-brought-you would need to go through before leaving, and that if the parent-who-brought-you thought that a group of sisters would not prevent departure before those formalities had been gone through, the parent-who-brought-you was very much mistaken."
The sister speaking had the wide vibrato of age in her voice, just like the-sister-in-charge-of-the-sisters-in-charge, but her face was curiously young. She also had bad breath. She continued talking. "As usual, there was a petition to cover the admission. Since you are now a sister, and hence have learnt to read and have earned the right to do so, you may read the text of it if you like. I will find it for you."
"Thank you, sister. May your day continue within the light of the sun."
"And yours too, sister. You are going out?"
"Yes, sister."
"Well, safe journey in the mouth of the beast, sister."
"Thank you, sister."
They each made the cut-throat gesture with the thumb of the passive hand, and each waved to the other with the governing hand, she first on each occasion, and she walked out.
She finishes, and puts the foamy hairs inside the hair-pocket. On an impulse, she reaches inside, removes the hairs, wipes off the foam with spider sorrel, and replaces the hairs inside the pocket.
She takes off the cloak and looks at the inside. The lining has now spread across the whole of the inside of the cloak, but it is thin, like the web of a swamp-spider. There are hidden tubes beneath the fur. The tubes are like worms. There are little blotches of colour along the length of all of them. They are coiled around each other like two tooth-worms in an eat-or-be-eaten struggle.
She pulls the cloak around her. Although it is thin, the fur is vibrating and the blood-warmth is circulating.
Her stomach growls. She eats some of her dark bread crumbs and all of the newly caught raw clean-fish. She now has a small bone in her throat. She still has some fresh crumbs in her bread pocket.
She lies on her back and watches the white clouds scudding across the blue sky. She looks up. She sees the clouds flex, jump in a flat line across the sky, straighten and bend again and straighten again, but not quite, as if the legs of the cloud won't go quite straight enough. She gets up and walks through the slushed mud as sticky as the black bread she has just eaten.
More thicket-wrens hop into view, and jabber hungrily. She takes out the remainder of her crumbs, and feeds them.
…and then what there is is the repetition of swamp oaf's falsetto saying "please be grateful" and the swamp oaf's voice is a mixture of wind-groans and branch-cracks like before but then the swamp oaf increases the pitch of the growl and it is then a grates and shimmers in the roof of winter leaves and fills her brain and makes it seem to bleed inside…
And now she is rushing away, leg-slapped by the undergrowth of pelt-blight running in a funnelling vee of shrivelled hoods, the shape and colour of her own cloak. She runs past abandoned gift-frog husks, ripped up by the high frequency of the lament of the swamp oaf. She finds herself at the night-eye blood-berry tree, which is still bare.
She stands beneath the tree. She hears a voice. And the voice is no longer her own voice, but it is female. The voice says "Welcome, darling-child. The arrowheads of the pelt-blight have led you to me. Just like the arrowheads of the pigs' heads led you to where you needed to shave."
She tries to speak but finds she can't. The voice continues. "I have to be fair to you, darling-child. Because of what is about to happen to you, you deserve an explanation, otherwise you will enter your new world in a state of ignorance, and you will be unhappy and – more importantly - the process will not work, so listen, my little foundling - never forget that you are a foundling, for I have both lost you and found you – please listen: I shall tell you the truth: everything that you assumed was wrong."
She has no voice. She is unable to move.
"This is what happened: I never had my own hut: people kept sending me away. I was staying in the hut of a friend. I walked from that hut to the hut of another and that another was your father, and, darling-child, we made you outside, where we could see each other beneath the light of the moon, which was at its burst-strength. And the moon changed me. I do not expect you to understand all this, for you are still a child and have not known the forest properly yet, but the moon changed me. And then you grew inside me. And I grew far bigger than seemed natural, and we thought that there were two of you. And you emerged, and there was only you, and you refused milk, and you would only drink the juice from parasite berries from the dishes made from the baked-mud foot prints of your parents. And your parents saw each other properly for the first time. And I also saw you properly for the first time. And I went away. And I loped to the hidden parts of the forest, and I was hungry, and I had to eat things that were poisoned, and I then mistakenly rested by this tree, which I was too new in my condition to recognise as an adversarial tree, and I couldn't move, because I was weakened by the poison, and this tree then absorbed me. And I have been here ever since. And now only you can free me."
And at last she manages to find her voice, which wells up from the acid in her stomach, and although she still can't speak, she can feel the thought going out of her. "Why did you abandon me?"
"You had to be left. There was no choice. He took you to the place where you now live. I have to confess that we had to drug you with berries, so you wouldn't know who had taken you, or where you had come from."
"Why do I have this scar?"
"I tried to cut you and suck the nutrition back out of you to try to save you but it was too late and that is also why your legs began to curve. That is why he took the knife from me and why we agreed that he should take you away. But now I have to do it again, because I am made inert and hibernated to the tree, and only the reversal of the blood-flow that first went from you to me through the skin-rope can resolve the dilemma. Only you can relieve me of my frozen melancholia. You have seen that your kitten has expired, so as I told you, you are now about to leave shaper-purgatory and progress to the next stage. And the next stage is called love-death, but it is not to be scared of. You will find peace."
…and then what there is is the screech-growling lament of the swamp oaf. "Please do not forget me. Please believe me that I do this for kindness. I can do nothing for you, but please do not forget me – that way you might still survive. But in what form? In what form?"
She feels the ice crackling into her skin. She hears the voice again. "Your choice is to be possessed or to freeze, my child - be possessed or freeze." "You have made some mistakes, daughter. You separated the hairs from the parasite berry foam. If you had kept the foam, you would have been safe - the foam of the parasite berries would have protected you. You fed the birds - you should have let them go hungry - your crumbs can now not protect you. And now things will go into reverse. And now there will be no more talk. Please do what you know you have to do."
She walks to The Oak of the Beast Within and the Oak of the False Prophet Without. She removes her "cloud-splashed sky" ribbon, loosely looped around the trunks of the trees, joining them. She walks to the night-eye blood-berry tree. She bares her navel. She reaches down, and picks up a pinch of muddied slush. She uses it to stick the end of the ribbon in the ridged pimple of her navel, next to the crescent of what she now has to call her mother-knife-scar. She takes the other end, and fixes it to the night-eye blood-berry tree. She feels the lining of her cloak getting thinner. She sees and feels her legs getting hairier. She sees and feels her legs go bald again. She feels something pulsing through her body along the ribbon to the tree. She waits. Faint drops of rain start to fall.
They have purposefully not searched for her, just as they stated, so it is only some days after she went missing, and quite by chance, when two of the sisters-in-charge eventually visit the scene whilst making their weekly journey around the perimeter of the safe-area to ensure that the ribbons are correctly placed on the trees to mark the boundary. (There are two of them rather than usual one because, following the howling thunderstorm, they heard the lament-drone of the swamp oaf overlaid by intermittent, equally high-pitched cries in the forest at night and they doubled up for safety.)
The Oak of the Beast Within and the Oak of the False Prophet Without have both finally collapsed, mingled into a single pile of dried bark-dust, the same texture as the powder from the desiccated anti-shaper-spirit drowned-kitten indulgences when their time is up.
The pile of dust is next to a tree that has two black diagonal stripes leading back across what is clearly its recently thickened girth, with a blue-and-white ribbon almost completely embedded in its bark. The tree is simultaneously smeared with unseasonal white flowers like tiny curved bones and with the red berries that are named for the night-eyes that always used to be seen in the wood but which the sisters-in-charge have never observed until a few days ago. There is a singed smell still held in the air, like the hint of a burnt library. There are droppings at the base of the tree, and they are three-day-crusted. There is something half-hidden in the pile of slushed dust: something that has the same colours and pattern as the ribbon: a style called "cloud-splashed sky". The sisters-in-charge together pull it out and pick it up, shaking off the cling of wet sawdust. The cloak is lightweight; flimsy. Unlined.
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