Nomvula

46. A Good Autumn Day

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Anathi waited until halfway through sunset to make her preparations. She should have started them when the Queen gave her command that morning, but the day had been too peaceful, and peaceful days too rare of late, so she had basked in it instead. Could she call it indulging? Did she remember how?  Well, she had no mouth to smile with, but there was a... lightness to her spirit. 

There was tension in the manse still -- the Queen's day-long talks with the elders would continue tomorrow, the Inner Plainers grew restless waiting for their leader, and a determined quiet hung over the Princess' room -- but one of the cleaner boys had "spotted" three barrels of beer with broken corks. They would have gone bad in two days. And how serendipitous, a trail musician had wandered in from a neighbouring villa, looking for a room in exchange for song. And what was that? He knew Inner Plainer chants! And so the General's men had done the brewers a favour and drunk the endangered beer, and with song and a hot sun to put them on their backs, the rest of the manse had breathed easier.

Anathi, in her clay avatar, rolled a chunk of broken cork across her knuckles. She sat on her eastermost roof, directly above the Queen's library, and watched her shadow stretch across the patio below. Her spirit self had no need for temporal understanding, but she had been a girl once, one who understood the sadness of a good day passing.

Even as the evening stars opened their eyes high above her many thatched roofs, the air was still thick with the afternoon heat. In the outside kitchens behind the grainhouse, hearty legume soups bubbled in fat-bellied pots. (There would be many drunk men in need of hearty, salty food and a good night's sleep soon.) Barrels of beer stood in neat in the cooling pantries dug deep into the earth. After the three compromised barrels had been removed, there had been fifty-one, now there were forty-five. Even Third Hillers got thirst, after all.

But the day had also taken its toll. 

Anathi shifted part of her consciousness to the Queen's bedroom. She watched the Queen kneel in the middle of the room light her prayer herbs. Her basin was still full of sud-grey bathwater, her dense hair soft and heavy with moisture that made it curl wildly about her head. It hung over her face when she leaned forward and struck a shard of flint over the stone bowl packed down with roots and twigs and grasses that Anathi had little need to know the significance of. Sweet smoke drifted up, high, high, high, until it licked the clay ceiling. Across the manse, above the library, her avatar wriggled its nose as though it itched.

When the Queen began drawing her ancestors near, Anathi left. As far as ancestors went, the Queen's were powerful and capable of great omens and greater violence, but it was their stares she hated most. They judged her not as a capable and (mostly) dutiful spirit, but as the girl she had been in life: eager to please, afraid, and dying. When they looked at her, she did not see Anathi the Keeper of Third Hill in their eyes' reflection. To them, she was a broken body by the river, gasping for air as she was pulled out of the water. 

She was a thing indebted to a Spirit Peddlar, who had not saved her body for humanity's sake, but so he could steal her spirit and sell it.

She was a thing bought by a King and given to his young bride.

Those that did not look down on her looked at her with pity, and she hated that almost as much.

Still, the Queen's ancestors tolerated her, because they needed her, more than they needed anything else in their existence. Was that the source of their anger? Those of royal birth weren't built to feel like they needed broken girls. Only the Queen saw her as anything more than a thing. Only the Queen had offered her freedom after her own passing. Until that mournful day, Anathi would protect, and she would do her best to enjoy days like these.