Mirabai the Twice-Lived Read online

  Mirabai the Twice-Lived

  By Cat Rambo

  Copyright 2015 Cat Rambo

  Mirabai the Twice-Lived

  My name is Mirabai. Mirabai the Twice-Lived. This evening I sit out on the upper terrace, smelling the yellow roses that grow along the staircase to the witches’ door. I have an old three-legged stool here, and I sit on it and look out across the village of Tyn Dashra, and see the cookfires glimmering. I’m old enough to remember when it was being built, believe it or not, despite the freshness of my skin, my just past a child's features.

  Down by the horta trellis they have lit a fire and are singing for Kal. I’ll go down soon. I can smell the smoke – thick green branches. No one had wanted to dry wood for his pyre. As though if we weren’t prepared for it, his death couldn’t come.

  So this morning when he shuddered and drew his last breath, no one had wood ready.

  While the Gologani went to find wood, I gathered roses, sorrow’s chilly dew clinging to yellow petals, and tucked them at his feet. I put a pouch in his hand. It held a curl from each of our children, and one from me at fifteen the first time, and one cut right there and then. One for each life.

  ***

  When I first came to Kere, in my first life, I was fifteen. All I wanted to do was join the Gologani, the dust scouts. They stood between our people and disaster in the form of the outsiders who sought to kill us and take our lands. Kal led them -- he was thirty-eight. I made my cousin Catria find out his age, the better to fit him into the dreams I conjured up each night, hugging my pillow as though I’d wrestle it into submission.

  I was full of young fire and passion. I dreamed of Kal, and I dreamed of rain. I went to the tribe’s Shakra, Arazza, and I told her a dream I’d had, or one that I said I’d had, at any rate, because I thought it would make a splendid tattoo. I said I’d seen plants, leafy vines, growing up and out of the evening dunes, bursting into red and blue flowers.

  I’d been drinking horta wine the night before and smoking dullweed, too, truth be told. I woke up and Arazza said she was done, that she’d never had anyone sleep under the needle like that, that I must have skin of iron. I looked at the vines she’d done on my arm and saw they were snakes, or rather one long snake with two heads, coiling back and forth.

  I was so mad at her, I made her put roses next to the snakes, as though they really were vines. I didn’t understand why she put those snakes on my arms for the longest time.

  When I was fifteen and three months, I liked to go down to the cliff caves where the mages stayed. They weren’t tribe, but they were trusted. I used to sit with the regular guards. They had good stories and some of them were nice – Enaias, for one, before he soured, and Shauvia was always a darling, if you had the patience to wait through all the stammering.

  I was there one night, watching the stars and trading night stories with them. A scout, Smoke I think it was, had brought jugs of horta wine, and a basket of stuffed peppers, and we were all swapping tall tales around the campfire.

  I told some about my uncle, who used to run the Flower up to Tuluk for schemes. Then they started talking about magic. I asked a few questions and a fire magicker – some longstrider, passing through -- reached over and pressed her fingers on my eyelids. The Gologani didn’t like that much – an outsider touching one of their own – so they muttered.

  But when I opened my eyes, I could see colored lights all through the rocks and sky. And the mages. And me. There were lights all through us. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

  The next day, the lights were still there. I went walking through Kere and I saw a man so bright with lights that it was like he was wearing a robe sewn with mirrors in the midday sun. I stared at him. He had a long nose, so droopy it looked like it might fall off his face, and eyes red with hangover.

  “What are you looking at, girl?” he said, sharp and a little nasty.

  “The lights, uncle,” I said. I was a polite scout, and minded my elders. Much good it ever did me.

  His eyes narrowed. He said, “What lights?”

  “The ones the mages made me see last night.”

  “And you see them still, half a day later?”

  And that was how I met Jothan and became a witch and learned that I was not destined to become a Gologani at all.

  I thought my heart would break. The witches frightened me, both of them, the last of a beleaguered group. So many of them had died over the years, while we searched for a home.

  So Jothan took me aside and explained my new role and that my pack and gear had been moved into the witches’ quarters on the Flower. That was before Tyn Dashra was built – aboard the largest wagon, all cramped and smelly, and it was one of the reasons I insisted that the witches have the quarters we do now, in Dashra, on the highest terrace, carved out of the living cliff rock.

  After that, it was less fun to hang around the mages. They all felt that they must teach me the proper ins and outs of magic. They lectured me about elementals and planes and spheres and the original language, tatlum. Then I would go learn with Jothan and Arazza, and they would tell me something entirely different. They said all magic was the result of calling spirits and bargaining with them.

  Truth be told, there seemed to be advantages and disadvantages to both methods, and so I used either hand, depending on the occasion. When I became Shakra, I taught the other witches both traditions, and let them pick what they’d use. Arazza would have slapped me silly if she’d caught me at it.

  But after I became Shakra, when Jothan and Arazza were both gone, people couldn’t make decisions for me anymore. I went to Kal and I told him I wouldn’t have anyone but him. It took me years to convince him. He didn’t think it right to take up with someone so much younger, even if I was the Shakra and answered to no one.

  We’d never had a wisewoman as young as me. For a while they waited to see if Arazza would come back from wherever she’d gone or if Jothan would recover his mind, but finally they had to admit that they were stuck with me and that it was time for me to learn all I could and start raising up a new crop of witches. Kal kept telling me I should settle down, and that just made me determined to be wilder somehow.

  We had more than a few rough years, Kal and I. He always took things too seriously. That’s his family’s way, while I’m Azia through and through. When he found out some mages had been wooing me, he wouldn’t speak to me anymore, went about beating his breast and pretending I didn’t exist because I’d let men outside the tribe touch me.

  I wouldn’t put up with that. I said that if he’d been willing to come to my bed when first asked, it would have saved both of us a lot of heartbreak. I still maintain that. There’s never been a Muark for me other than Kaldoryk, there never will be. Had he really expected me to be celibate, though, I asked?

  Well, but with an outsider, he said. But you see, by then I was as comfortable with them as with any Tan Muark. Jothan and Raz’s fault as much as anything. They tried to keep me isolated. Away from my fellow dust scouts.

  Kal got crankier and grumblier and older, but I never stopped wanting him all those years. First I birthed our son, Tahn, and later our daughter.

  And in between all that, I struggled with the outsider mages that had taken refuge with us, trying to find them a safe haven away from our doorstop, and stop them from bringing down city wrath on us. Kal kept fussing at me over how they stirred up trouble. They were dangerous, he said, they led our young to thinking they could trust outsiders.

  If we trusted no one, I said, then why did we have the word tesitai, outsiders that can be talked to?

  He grumbled that we were too quick to give out that name.

  Finally I got them elsewhere, and even then he grumbled, par
ticularly when I went visiting and was gone from his bed a night or two. But things settled into shape, somehow, and the magickers had their own troubles.

  And then, right about the time Tahn’s oldest daughter was starting her first baby, I was teaching some of the witches how to cast a spell against aging. I must admit, my mind was on Kal and his creakiness, but I thought it wouldn’t be too bad to lose a few years of my own. We’d figured out how to expand the spell.

  Or so we thought.

  We used a doll as the spell’s focus, little Petsha’s doll. Toddler Petsha, who’d been stamped to death by a mount the winter before. Brief years, you see. That was how many we wanted to take off – enough to feel a difference, not so many it’d be an unnatural shock.

  It’s good working magic together, particularly when everyone knows everyone else. I’d known it with the mages, but we were getting to that point, or we’d be there within a year or so. By now, decades later, we can finish each other’s incantations.

  So we cast. The spirits pressed in from all sides, like a hot summer night just before a storm. We were using the innermost stone chamber. Tylee had made fresh white candles for the ceremony. I’d ground fresh runebane and daubed the mixture in the corners, sending out a green, minty scent.

  In the middle of it, the doll in a green chalk circle. A slight thing, made of leather stuffed with sand, with eyes made of coal. Dressed in Muark blue, and a striped silk sash, like the one I wear around my waist to this day. Nowadays, no one wears tribal gear – it’s all bardic silks and Byn armbands and sandcloth outfits.

  I led the circle, chanting to keep everyone in rhythm.

  Maybe I got cocky – I don’t know. I’d been the Shakra for a good two dozen years by then. I’d been kidnapped more than once, and I’d kidnapped a Borsail baby one time. Worse, I’d killed an entire Borsail scouting party – I swear they must not have realized that they’d found the other end of one of our bolt-tunnels. They didn’t understand that the child that ran from them in the early morning fog would go and fetch a more powerful mage than any of them had ever dealt with.

  They crawled out of the tunnel entrance, through the trellis, and were still looking around when I arrived, invisible. One was sticking his sword through the midden heap. I don’t know what he expected to find – it was all melon rinds and horta peel.

  I spoke words that put them all to sleep. I took the long, leaf-bladed knife from my sash, and went from person to person. I pulled each’s head up by their helmet boss or strap, and I cut their throats as they dreamed. They had come armed into my village, outsiders come bearing weapons against the people I was sworn to protect. So I killed them.

  The last was a southern noble, golden wyverns on his fingers. That was how I knew he was a Borsail. I slipped the rings off, and had them recast into serpents for my fingers, to wear next to the silver rings one of the mages had given me.

  Kal showed up when I was almost done. He nodded and toed each body to make sure it was dead. I felt so tough and complicated, and a little proud of what I’d done. And that evening, we worked our spell.

  So maybe I was too cocky, too ready to think myself capable of handling the trickiest magic, make it up on the fly. I channeled our chant into the doll and was unsurprised when it stirred and sat up, looking around at us with unblinking eyes.

  “_____”, it said – how, I don’t know, Tahn explained it once and I didn’t understand a word of it.

  No one knew what to say.

  “_____”, it said, sitting up more.

  “Lie down and be quiet,” I told it. But it stood and looked around the chamber. It danced a little in place, as though testing out its limbs.

  Kataila was nearest, and she grabbed at the doll, but it leaped over her grasping fingers. It doubled over with laughter that echoed in our heads – get Tahn to explain that!

  It ran, and we chased it.

  You would have thought we had been drinking for hours, the way we staggered and laughed, giddy with the silliness of chasing a toy, a child’s toy, through our chambers. And it set out to make us laugh, it scampered and back-pedaled and pratfalled until we were fighting to breathe.

  And not noticing what was happening, the years slipping away. We thought it was the laughter that made us feel so good – bursting with energy! So wonderful! Magic running through us like horta brandy.

  Until the doll fell over, lifeless, and we realized that our clothes were baggy on us, that we were half our height – and I had never been the tallest woman in camp, so I resented the loss bitterly.

  We were children again – Petsha’s age.

  One of us burst into tears – I won’t embarrass them by saying who. The rest of us were excited and giddy still, with an odd thrill, like stealing cookies. Children again and this time, no parents! We agreed we’d meet in the morning and discuss how to reverse the spell.

  I went out on the steps. When we were first courting, when Kal realized that there would be no resisting me, when I finally convinced him to give into happiness, he used to braid yellow roses into my hair, roses cut from the stairs with a leaf-bladed scout’s knife.

  The roses were not blooming now, but furled. I shredded a bud with my thumbnail. The damp, aromatic petals clung to my fingers. I saw Tahn coming up the main terrace steps. He hadn’t been able to attend the ritual because his wife was birthing. She must have finished – his shoulders were tight with weariness but happy. He looked up at me just as two of the other children came out. His face was puzzled.

  “You shouldn’t be here, it’s the witches’ quarters,” he said.

  I couldn’t help myself – I laughed at how affronted he looked.

  He scowled. “Don’t make me send you off to be spanked.”

  “At least I always did you the grace of doing it myself, Tahn’arri!” I said. I folded my arms and frowned back down at him.

  He peered at me. “Mama?”

  It was all I could do to keep from laughing again.

  He insisted on walking me over to the ravine where the Flower was. I kept my clothing and such in the witches’ chambers, but I slept down in the wagon, with Kal, in his little cedar-scented room, where everything had its place.

  “What will Papa think?” he asked.

  “It won’t be the most outrageous thing I’ve ever done to him, I’m sure.”

  “High up the list, at least,” he muttered, but he had the grace to be quiet after that.

  I wasn’t sure how I was going to tell Kal. So I knocked at the door, rather than opening it, and he came to the doorway and looked down at me.

  “What is it, child?” he asked, then broke off as I looked up. He knew me instantly – what does that say?

  “How, Mira?” he asked. He stepped aside and I stepped in and sat down on the edge of the wide cot.

  “A ritual gone awry,” I said. I smoothed my hands over the woolen blanket, feeling the subtle ridges of the weave.

  He sighed. It was a noise that I’d always hated, because of the degree of exasperated patience that it conveyed. I’d heard every shade from mild irritation that I’d moved his things to an almost agonized how did you end up in the Tablelands, days away? But for once, he didn’t say anything more – forty years of partnership will do that to you.

  He held out his arms, and we laid down on the cot together. I could smell him – sweat and tack oil and just an edge of horta brandy. He stroked my shoulders, and his fingers trembled just a little. The wind had picked up and sand whispered secrets against the outer walls. Kal’s cheek felt papery and wrinkled against mine.

  “How old are you now?” he asked.

  “Four and a half. Like Petsha.”

  He touched my hair. “But all your memories.”

  “Yes. But…”

  “What?”

  “They seem dim and far away now. Like a story someone told me once.”

  He rested his head back against the pillow and used his free hand to tuck the blanket tighter around us. “You’re so warm, you bur
n like a little fire,” he said, then laughed. “You always did, caer-mi, heart’s heart.”

  We dozed together. Early in the morning, as ever, he roused with the first light and crept out with a creak of boot leather and the rustle of his cloak.

  There was no way to reverse the magic, and no one could find the doll. Kal was a little wry about it, though less so by the time that I figured was the equivalent of my fifteenth birthday rolled around. I got one of the other witches to tattoo me, and she gave me my snakes again, but this time she tinted them blue and purple, and gave them finer scales, and fangs with a glint of light.

  That night I got Kal drunk on horta brandy, and brought him, as he should have come, decades earlier, to my bed, to be the first love of this life.

  It always seemed to me that the mathematics of it all didn’t add up. If I had my years, and Petsha’s years, wouldn’t that simply be mine plus a few? Instead, at sixty, I found myself four again – and how many years lay before me, I wasn’t sure. And Kal was never the same after the change. He dwindled. Then he moved to a tent in the Sprawl to avoid the steps up and down into the Flower. I slept there too, and brought him food, and rubbed him with liniment and practiced the small magics that he would allow.

  When it first came to me that he was dying, I went to the horta trellis. You can crawl inside – we'd made love there more than once, smelling ripening horta all around and coming out with sticky purple bruises of drying juice. Now I lay there next to the earth and cried, spreading my fingers to feel the ground.

  I had always known he’d die before me – or thought it likely, at any rate. But I’d also thought it would not be by too many years. Now there I was, my face and hands a mere sixteen, my heart not as old as my dying husband’s, but old enough. I reached out for a horta now, but they were not ripe yet.

  It was the story of my life – always out of sync with time.

  Kal had tried to joke with me about it.

  “You’ll have to find yourself some young buck when I’m gone,” he teased. “Someone who can provide well.”