She awoke in darkness. It seemed woven about her. She couldn’t move her arms or legs. And there was a voice, speaking somewhere far below her. It was very clear and very persistent. “These are the Disobediences of the Will. To believe that the body belongs to the will, and that the will controls one’s body. To believe that thoughts belong to the will, and that the will control’s one’s thoughts. To believe that the emotions belong to the will, and that the will controls one’s emotions…” The words were like a thread, and as she listened they seemed to weave around her. *That’s right,* she thought. *It makes sense. What is the will, anyway? It’s just a disguise for selfishness. All of those people who said the witch cursed them when she didn’t. Like they had no will. But really it was their will, hiding behind the supposed curses. And Tafaemi. She thought she could control Uku with her will. Bind him to her for life. Make him do whatever she told him to. And she was right. She could. Because of the bats. Because there are monsters that take our will away from us. But why should we want to have it? What’s the use of having willpower? Isn’t it all just selfishness?*
She could feel her thoughts weaving with the voice. As if they were singing together. Harmony. Like Taeyaho’s singing. Only Taeyaho mostly sang alone. Poor Taeyaho. The voice was saying “To believe that desire belongs to the will, and the will can control desire. To question the Scrupulous Canons. To question the masters. To believe one is a master, and has the privilege of sharing hidden knowledge. These are the Disobediences of Pride. To believe that you are special in the eyes of others…” Poor Taeyaho, with a branch through his body. Pierced by a storm. But maybe it was like a needle. A nice needle, pulling thread. Thread that sewed him together with the voice’s words. Made a nice warm cocoon for him. A place where he could be safe. Like she was. “To believe that you have a special place in history,” the voice was saying. “To believe that you have special talents and gifts. To believe that you are worthy of a unique name.”
She had called herself by her mother’s name when she first joined the caravan. Poor dumb Kumynoe. So extinguished by grief that she sold her daughter. Sold her, when Aizdha would have taken her in for nothing. Taken them both in. Fed them. Treated them well. Like old friends. Like scholars. Not slaves. No need for slaves. The voice was right. It didn’t matter if you were talented. It didn’t matter that she could draw, or write. Aizdha would have taken her in, anyway. Aizdha was good. Good people didn’t care what you could do. They took care of you even if you couldn’t do anything. What were talents for, accept to convince you that you were special. Better than other people. Good people like Aizdha, like Cloedeya, didn’t love you because you were better than others. They loved you just because you were you. “To believe that you should be permitted the exercise of the will,” the voice said. “To believe that your body is your own…”
She hadn’t felt like her mother when she took her name. That’s why she hadn’t kept it for very long. What was the point? Names had meaning, and Kumynoe meant giving up, living in rags, selling your body, throwing yourself off of cliffs. The name was like a ghost. Kumynoe the ghost. But not a ghost who followed her. Not a ghost she could leave in a cave. A ghost who was gone. A gone ghost. Gone forever. Or maybe walking somewhere. Maybe floating over the sea. She was glad Aizdha had stayed in a cave. She was glad that he wasn’t out in the water, coming in and going out on the tide. Ghosts didn’t have bodies. Their bodies weren’t their own. And weren’t all people ghosts, really? Not just the dead ones. The ones you left behind. The people you abandoned along the way. Wasn’t Cloedeya a ghost now? And Melsa? And Big Praeda? And Little Praeda? And Koenbahki? And Uku? And even Tafaemi? None of them were with her. They only lived in her memory. Their bodies were not their own. “These are the Disobediences of Hopelessness,” the voice was saying. “To believe in the goodness of the Previous World. To believe that your past matters. To believe that the Master doesn’t love you. To believe that your work has no value. To believe that your life doesn’t benefit the community.”
She was aware of a presence. It floated near her in the darkness. For a moment she thought it was the voice. That the voice had taken on a shape. A strange, bodiless shape. Just a quivering in the darkness. The voice was telling her not to, but she willed the shape to come near. Come here, little presence. Come closer little shape.
It was a ghost, a real ghost, that of someone newly dead. She knew this as soon as it moved into her. Suddenly her bones ached. Like someone had been hammering repeatedly at her joints. There was a burning sensation in her left leg. It wasn’t burnt, she knew. It just felt like that from time to time. It was because she was so old. But wily. Always wily. Her great gift. The thing she was best at. Being wily. “These are the Disobediences of the Curious,” the voice was saying. “To be curious about the community. To be curious about oneself…” But the ghost didn’t believe a word of it. It settled over her like a membrane. Like the shell of an egg. It scoffed at what she had been thinking. She wasn’t safe here. Good people enjoyed each other’s talents. Her friends weren’t dead. They weren’t even abandoned. She would go back to them, once she escaped. She should ignore the voice.
Then she was an old man, sitting beside a road. The beautiful and ugly tinker was gone. Inchy was dead, with a spear through his chest. He was lying there, useless. His dead arm was flung out along the surface of the road, and his dead fingers seemed poised to scratch at the dirt. The last of the company. Or rather, the old man was the last of the company, but if a company only had one member, was it really a company? He should have given his sword to the tinker. She had Inchy’s sword, now. And he could have kept traveling with her, all the way to Hasra. If he had only given her his sword.
But he was too old for uncertain futures. And it was a long way. All the way back across the mountains. A route he hadn’t taken for years. Not since he was young. He was too old. And he would die on the way. Better just to die here, on this hot road. Someone would come by and find his body. And Inchy’s. Although he didn’t really want to be buried with Inchy. Fifty people in the company, and he and Inchy were the last two standing. Why couldn’t he have had Ursapoh as his last companion? She was nice. They had slept together for a solid year, back when they were fighting in the far north. But every morning she had said, “Just until this is over. We won’t be lovers when we return to Yenceyan.” Still, she probably would have accepted him in her dotage. If she hadn’t been killed by that prahnivasha. The sun beat down. He was intolerably hot. He wondered if you could just ask the dirt to kill you. Or the wind.
The voice had returned to the beginning of its recitation. “These are the Disobediences of the Will. To believe that the body belongs to the will, and that the will controls the body. To believe that thoughts belong to the will…” It tugged at her. Like little strings had been attached to her mind with hooks. But they couldn’t pull her past the eggshell that the ghost had surrounded her with. She was inside him, more than he was inside her. Part of him was paying attention to the words. *”So this is it,”* he was thinking. *”This is what everyone has been nattering on about. The Purgation of the Cradle. What nonsense. If I get through it, they’ll feed me better. And I wonder what the women look like, under those veils.”*
She was caught in his memories again. A warrior woman with calloused hands. She had pierced her ears in multiple places, and she liked bone earrings. He would stroke them when they made love. He liked the smoothness of the bone against his thumb pads. She tasted like honeyed meat. She smelt like iron. A good smell. One he understood. They were in a tent. The canvas was wet and it made the air moist. The sun was beginning to shine, and the air around their bodies was like steam rising from a pot. When they were finished she rolled off of him. He lay beside her and looked up at the canvas. The sun had made it yellow. Like the yolk of an egg. She said, “This is just for now. It will be over when we return to Yenceyan.”
“To believe that you should be permitted the exercise of the will,” the voice was saying, “To believe that your body is your own.” Manrie found that she was laughing. Her body wasn’t her own. Not while the ghost was surrounding her. She had never lain with anyone. Only now she had lain with the woman with calloused hands. Only she hadn’t. It was the ghost. A sad memory, she thought, and her laughter died away. Why hadn’t the woman with bones in her ears loved the poor ghost when he was alive?
Cloedeya and Melsa and Big Praeda loved each other. Enough to eat the okubrahchi. Enough to bind themselves to each other forever. She would never be loved like that. Her hand had been inside Uku’s mouth. She had seen Taeyaho’s shy looks. And maybe Koenbahki… But never mind. She was believing that her body was her own. That she could pick and choose among people, that her love could run in any direction it wanted to, or many directions at once. What had Cloedeya said? “I think for you, people might be what food is for me.” Only people hurt each other. People manipulated and abused and abandoned each other.
“To be curious about the world outside the farm,” the voice was saying. “To be curious about the future. To be curious about the Master. To be curious about the land.”
A door opened. Sudden light. It was somewhere below her, and in its glow she saw that she was in a hallway, and the floor slanted downward, running in a tight spiral around a central pillar. She was strapped to the outside wall, her body encased in swaddling, and she saw other figures who dangled in these cocoons. She realized that her head was free. That she had control of her neck, her shoulders. There was a woman cocooned to her left, below her on the tilting floor. Her eyes were closed, her chin lowered to her chest. Her cocoon seemed to be veined, as if a vine had crept over it. She could see another figure beyond this woman, just as the floor turned out of sight.
The voice was saying, “To believe that your life doesn’t benefit the community. To believe that the land cannot be tamed. To believe that the land is not the enemy.”
But another voice was speaking. A high, childish voice. It was meant to be a whisper, but it pierced the darkness. “Yes, he’s dead. I thought that he was too old for the Cradle. But he kept insisting. A waste. Help me get him down.”
The cocooned woman to Manrie’s left didn’t seem to notice the disturbance. Manrie turned her head to her right, to see if there were others, and if anyone else was awake. She found herself looking up at Taeyaho. He was asleep, his pearlescent hair just catching the edge of light from below. In sleep his nose seemed thinned, his cheeks sunken. Had he died, too? She felt the ghost looking with her. *Go to him,* she pleaded. *Wake him up.*
It left her, and her eyes closed. The voice was speaking. It was a good voice. A reasonable voice. A voice that revealed truths. “Knowledge is fleeting,” the voice said. “One kind of knowledge must die for another kind to be born. There are only three truths that last forever. The first is that the land wants to kill us. The second is that we are greater than the land. The third is that there is no return to the Previous World. Only the Master knows more than this. These are the Disobediences of the Will. To believe that the body belongs to the will, and that the will controls the body…” Manrie saw the Master in her mind. Why had she ever thought that he was like a mushroom? He was clean. He was right. He was so beautiful. She wanted to kneel at his feet and learn from him. She would do whatever he told her to.
The ghost was back. It saw the dissipation of her mind and made an abrupt, angry gesture, like it was drawing a sword. She saw its gloves. Good kid gloves, good for fighting. Your pommel wouldn’t slip with gloves like that. Not if you’d been fighting for hours, and your whole body was a sheen of sweat. She raised her head and faced memories of cascading violence. That man who began to sob when his guts were cut open, loud, howling sobs that filled the valley. That woman who wouldn’t die, wouldn’t stop fighting, despite the fact that he’d cut her shoulder in two. And there were monsters. She saw a rinchonyan rearing up at dusk, its plates fanning out around its head. He was holding a long spear. He was in a line of other warriors. It would take the entire company to kill it. Its legs were stirring up the dust of the hill, and someone was already screaming.
She turned her head away from the memories and found that she was looking back down the slanting stairs. The light was dimming, as if a door was closing. She glanced quickly to the right, towards Taeyaho, and breathed when she saw that his eyes were open. He was looking at her. The light went out, and she thought that he might drift back into obedience, into the trance that made them believe the voice.
Instead, he started to sing. His high, sweet voice was very soft, meant for her ears only. As if he meant to help her. He sang,
“Greet me with a flood of light,
make my body weak,
show yourself to me,
so I see myself translucent,
a window to your love.
As my body sleeps,
let me see you,
complete.
Draw me to a secret place,
ask me what I want,
enlighten me.
Play a game with me
that no part of me has known,
not my body,
not my work,
not my honor,
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not even my loving care for others.
A game of silence that knows no words.
A game that lifts me from the earth,
that quiets the past,
that tells me that I am music,
that I am a spice for you to taste,
that my yearning is a lavish gift.
Greet me with many streams of water,
let my poor, parched soul drink new knowledge,
new contemplation,
new awareness of your presence.
O Sweet One, inwardly on fire,
outwardly blossoming,
take me beyond myself
into your sumptuous,
silent nothing.
She didn’t understand the song. But she understood that it was his egg shell, and he was trying to share it with her. Just as she had sent the ghost to him. Protection. They were both trying to protect each other.
Even the ghost was listening. He was confused, almost angry. And she understood that the ghost was deeply sad. He was the last of his company. She saw their faces, floating by. Some beautiful. Others ugly. Others unremarkable. But each carrying a set of memories. There was a campfire, and a young boy, new to the company, insisting that he knew how to make the army rations better, running stems of grassy herbs between his long fingers. A night in the guard tower, everyone drunk accept for the tall man who always looked like he knew something, an annoying expression that got him into many fights, because people thought he was mocking them. A woman, bathing in a river. A grayish tint to her brown skin. Big breasts, big hips. Like she had been molded from clay. He didn’t want her, but he liked watching her, and she knew it, and smiled at him, and they had an understanding. More and more memories, all of the dead that he carried, and she forgot Taeyaho’s song, forgot the voice speaking from the central pillar, forgot her discomfort in the cocoon, and was lost in the old man’s recollections.
And then she was outside. The sun was shining. There was something stiff and clean-smelling covering her face. She could see through it. She looked through a pattern of fiber at the turned earth of a field row. The sun was very bright, and was made brighter by the white fabric. She glanced to her left and to her right. There were other veiled figures, one at the top of each row. All women, perhaps. But how did she know that all of the people in veiled head dresses were women? It could be that Taeyaho was hidden in starched white robes.
The robes were like another cocoon, and she guessed, from this, that she was still meant to be asleep. She was aware of someone, moving back and forth behind her and the other kneeling figures. Someone who was inspecting them. Maybe more than one person, as she thought she could make out multiple footfalls. The back of her neck prickled. Even beneath the folds of cloth she felt exposed, open to some sudden violence.
Then a woman’s voice spoke. “We are missing one.” A slow, stony voice that she recognized from the wheel house. Naiklora.
“Yes,” a high, childish voice answered her. “The old guardsman the Master found beside the road. He died in the cradle.”
“A waste,” Naiklora said.
“Perhaps. But one is of little use until one becomes a Buried Root.”
“We will have a soured row.”
“Perhaps others will come before we are ready for sowing.”
“Yes. And some of these might sprout.”
“Oh, yes!” the high voice enthused. “It is deeply to be hoped!”
The voices moved on. They dwindled to nothing. Manrie stared down at the dark ground. She could see ants moving through the clumps of earth. Tiny sprouts had been turned up by plowing, and she counted the little tendrils that clung to their roots. A shadow fell across the ground and a figure squatted beside her.
“You’ve grown up!” Pumpkin said. “You’re not a baby anymore!”
“I haven’t been a baby for a long time,” Manrie muttered.
Pumpkin fell backwards. “You speak! Roots don’t speak!”
“This one does,” Manrie said. Then she wished she hadn’t. She had an immediate sense of danger. As if the mysteries of these people were like eyes glowing from a dark cave.
“Oh,” Pumpkin breathed. “This is trouble. You were in the cradle. But you’re not a root. Oh, that’s bad. That’s very bad.”
“What’s bad about it?”
“No one does that. All of the babies become roots.”
“Maybe I am one, then.”
“Roots don’t speak,” Pumpkin insisted.
Manrie watched her carefully out of the corner of her eye. She could sense that the girl was about to run off, to fetch someone. “If a root did speak, it would be interesting to hear what it had to say,” Manrie suggested.
The girl paused in her skittishness. “What does a root have to say?”
“It might know things. From being in the ground. It might have stories to tell about roots and insects.”
“Roots and insects are boring.”
“There’s another world down there,” Manrie said, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. Pumpkin’s form was gauzy and indistinct, as if she was a moth that might flit away at any moment. “And monsters.”
“Monsters? Beneath the plants?”
“Some monsters disguise themselves as plants. Some plants are nothing but the whiskers of a monster.”
Pumpkin hesitated. “I don’t believe you.”
“You should. I studied monsters. I hunted them, with my friend Aizdha. We went all over the land, looking for monsters. In Pahyangoeda we found a monster in the lake that had lily pads for hair.”
Pumpkin considered. “That’s silly,” she said in a flat voice that pretended disinterest.
“It wasn’t silly to the three fishermen it ate. My mas…Aizdha only noticed it because I had been sketching. We knew that fishermen had been disappearing. And he wanted to investigate the eastern shore. But he was very painstaking. It was boring. So I sat and sketched the lake as he measured things. The next morning he asked to look at my drawing when we returned to the lakeshore. And he saw how the lily pads had moved. It was hard to kill that monster.”
“How did you kill it?” Pumpkin asked.
“A fisherman agreed to be eaten.”
“What?”
“He was very old and he had a tremendous tumor growing out of his chest. He could barely breathe. His daughter had been taking care of him, but he knew he was dying. He made her bring him down to the lakeshore. Then he asked Aizdha to poison him.”
“Did he? Did he poison him?”
“Yes. With the bark of the velenkursi tree. He drank a broth that was made of it, and then he rowed out onto the lake. We watched him in the early dawn. The lily pads surrounded his boat and pulled it under. But the poison acts slowly. We had to sit by the lakeshore for seven nights, waiting for the monster’s body to float to the surface.”
“And was the monster dead?”
“Oh yes. It was very flat, and its flesh was gray. You could mistake it for a giant stone. But it had eyes. Thirty-seven of them. And when we pried its stony body apart, it had thousands of teeth.”
“Why did it want to eat people?”
“I think it wanted to eat all sorts of things. But we made ourselves available.”
Pumpkin was silent for a moment. Then she leapt to her feet and ran off. Manrie tensed. But in a moment Pumpkin was back. “Karkriesha is coming. If I don’t tell on you, will you tell me more stories?”
“Yes.”
“Look down at the ground like a good little root. Don’t let them know you’re awake.”
Manrie looked down at the ground. The shadows cast by the clumps of earth were growing longer. The air was growing colder. Night was coming on.
She felt the ghost of the old guardsman stir inside her. She felt a great sense of relief. He was still there. He didn’t like that the other people were covered in white cloth. It made it hard for him to determine whether they were threats. She could sense him looking around, and she thought *Can you leave me for a moment? Can you can go and see where we are?* She could feel his silent assent. Then she had a moment of grasping anxiety. *You will come back? You won’t abandon me?* It was almost as if he grunted in her head. A fond, dismissive grunt. An old man amused by the misgivings of a child. *Anxiety,* she thought, as she felt him leave her body, *worry, disquiet.* But the game of words made her too sad. Uku must be dead. He certainly wasn’t here.
A voice, speaking behind her. “The Sixth Disobedience of Hopelessness. To Believe that the land cannot be tamed.” It was Baenlaez’s voice, rich and plummy. She thought that he might start up the recitation again, the endless round of disobediences that she had heard in the cradle. She felt them tug at her mind. But Baenlaez began to say something new.
“We shape the land with our bodies. That is the usefulness of our bodies. We defecate and urinate. It tames the land. We domesticate animals. They defecate and urinate. The land grows fertile. Every hamlet, every village, every town, every city, is built upon the taming powers of our bodies. It is we who are fertile. We lend our fertility to the earth, and the earth is tamed. It obeys us. It gives forth greater abundance. Our bodies cause the grain to grow. Our bodies cause the trees to fruit. We eat and then we produce manure. That is the usefulness of our bodies. We eat the gift of those who came before us. The gift of their bodies. Their defecation. Their urination. Made fertile soil. Soil in which plants can grow abundantly. We eat the gift of the animals that they tamed. We eat their wisdom, for they learned to plow and sow. Our ancestors gave us our bodies. By procreating. By taming the land with their manure. We will give bodies to those who come after us. By procreating. By taming the land with our manure. That is the usefulness of our bodies.”
The ghost was back. It rushed into her and she could see everything that it had seen. She saw Baenlaez, sitting halfway up a cliff behind her. He was sitting on a throne made from a great tortoise shell, perched upon a wide ledge. Naiklora was standing to one side of him and the little alchemist, Retoebaeni, was at his other side. Baenlaez was reading from a great, bound book.
The field that Manrie knelt in was oddly situated. It did not fan out from a wide building but was pressed right against the cliff. A rectangle, divided by long rows. The ghost had walked along behind the other kneeling figures. He had shifted through the cloth that covered their bodies and their faces. He had found Taeyaho. This realization almost made Manrie leap with joy. She found that she was quivering. Taeyaho was only five rows away from her. He was looking at the ground, his posture exactly the same as the others. He was indistinguishable in his white veil. But he was singing. A low, undulating song. The ghost had paused to listen. A song of the earth, a little, playful tune about rivers and streams and falling autumn leaves. It hadn’t really interested the ghost. He had moved on. He had sensed that someone was looking at him, and turned to see the Naiklora’s eyes fixed on him. Naiklora’s expression had gone flat with wonder. She had reached out a hand to touch Baenlaez’s arm, and then stopped herself, as if she were afraid to interrupt the Master’s recitation. The ghost had fled back to Manrie.
“Our ancestors gave their bodies to the land,” Baenlaez recited. “Even in death, their bodies were useful. They lay down in the earth. They decomposed. Flesh and skin and muscle became sod, loam, earth. They were eaten by insects. They tamed the insects. They were eaten by worms. They tamed the worms. Roots grew into them. Plants fed upon them. They tamed the wheat. They tamed the beans and the peas. They tamed the fruit trees, and the nut trees. In their deaths, they tamed the land. That was the usefulness of their bodies. That will be the usefulness of our bodies. Children will live because we die. Our descendants will continue the great work of taming the land. No one will starve because we die. Our friends and companions will eat and continue the great work of taming the land. That is the usefulness of our bodies.”
Something was happening in the field row. A shape was disentangling itself from the earth. Hair seemed to float upwards like exposed root tendrils. A face pushed through the dirt. Vaporous. Clean. Eyes looked into Manrie’s own. She was young, like Manrie. She was very thin, and her sallow cheeks seemed to push the bones of her eye sockets upwards. She was completely naked, and as she rose to stand, Manrie could count her ribs. She stood at the edge of the field, right in front of Manrie, and her toes seemed to dig into the plowed earth.
Manrie risked a glance to the right and to the left. Other spirits were rising to stand in front of the kneeling figures. She tried to hear Taeyaho over Baenlaez’s loud declaiming. She wondered if his song was faltering. She could feel the guardsman’s spirit shift inside of her. Another memory. Ghosts gathering after a battle on a hill. Their presence made the living soldiers mutinous. And the mad king seemed too delighted in them, as if they were there to confirm his mad beliefs. If the company had still been strong when they went into battle, their ghosts might have comforted the old guardsman. But it was too late. Most of the company had died long ago. There had been only Inchy and Lewcahrd left when the battle began, and now Lewcahrd was dead. But his ghost didn’t seem interested in his old friends.
She pushed these foreign memories away, pushed away the scent of smoke and the grit on her skin and the tiredness of her muscles. She had been wounded on her left forearm, a shallow cut that wasn’t dangerous but stung. Only she hadn’t. She was not the guardsman. She was herself. And the ghost of a starving girl was looking at her.
She couldn’t help it. She felt such pity. She opened herself wide and invited the girl in. As she felt the rush of memory and personality, she heard a voice call out from the ledge on the cliff. And then she was lost in another person’s yearnings, another person’s taken life.