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--
Tifa parts ways with Ganan outside his overbuilt house, and leaves the horses. She walks back to their - her room-and-a-half, watching the rising moons. She lights the stove to make tea. She stares at the pile of fabric on the low table and doesn't pick it up.
There is work to be done, and Tifa has put it off since Theo got his acceptance letter, feeling like her last days with him were too precious to be spent on something so trivial as keeping herself fed. She has spent thirteen years worrying about Theo. She has spent thirteen years trying to give him a better life. She succeeded; Theo has gone off to Aftzaak to the job of his dreams, after years of work and study and the gamble of a year's savings on the exam fee, and Tifa sent him on his way with a smile.
She drinks the tea. She doesn't pick up the half-embroidered festival tunic. She goes to their - her bed, lays down right in the middle, and tells herself to be happy she got what she always wanted.
--
Years of habit get her to the tea garden only an hour after sunrise. Most of the other workers are already in the shed. Tifa takes a basket over to the leaf bins, feeling numb. The supervisor looks up from his account book, but he doesn't say anything.
In a while she's pounded twenty teacakes together. They sit on the table next to her in an irregular heap. Tifa can feel the supervisor's eyes on the back of her head. She can feel the sweat trickling down her sides. She can feel a tug on her skirt. She looks down.
It's Sinta's little girl, whose name Tifa ought to know but doesn't. She just turned three. She should be home with her grandmother, but her grandmother is sick and Sinta doesn't dare stop working to look after her. All this goes through Tifa's head at an abstracted distance, like a story she's forgotten the ending of. "Hello," she says.
"Hello," says the girl. "I found a rock." She holds it up. It's grey, smooth, and looks like a thousand other rocks from the river.
"That's nice. Why don't you go show your mother?"
"I have a whole lot of rocks at home."
"You must be very proud of your collection."
"I like rocks."
Was Theo this tiresome at three? It was ten years ago. Tifa can't remember. He must not have been, or she would not have been able to bring him to work every day with no more than faint grumbling and reminders, almost every day, that she was being paid by the basket. "Your mother must like rocks too, if she lets you keep them at home," she tries. "Go tell her all about this one."
"Okay," says Sinta's girl, apparently not offended, and toddles off toward the other end of the shed. Tifa pushes her teacake mould sideways on the table, then back again.
--
Tifa stops halfway to the sheep farm, because she's too dizzy to take another step.
Which makes no sense. She didn't have time for breakfast this morning, but she'd wrapped a leftover chapatti in a cloth and she's eaten half of it already. She had dinner last night, with Theo, before they rode out to the hills. She's not shorted herself to feed him for years. She manages to sit down without falling over, taking deep, careful breaths. It doesn't matter when she gets there, exactly. It's the slow season, winter coats not yet sheared and lambs not yet born. If Tifa simply didn't turn up, they would dock her a day's wages and say nothing more about it.
She's not feeding a growing boy anymore. She could lose a day's wages without disaster.
Tifa is still debating whether it would be a betrayal of all the determination she tried to teach Theo to stumble back home and spend the afternoon sleeping, when the next person makes the bend in the road, sees her, and starts to hurry. She blinks at them. Her, it's a her, it's - Hano, the spinner, who shorts the skeins but never quite so badly it's worth complaining. How bad-off does Tifa look if Hano could be bothered to drop her woolsack and hurry over? "Hey. What's going on?"
"Just - I felt bad," she says. Close enough.
Hano plants her hands on her hips. Her hair is coming out of her turban, grey curls that look greasy from neglect. "You'll feel worse if you get run over by a cart. Come on, there's a wall right there," and she grabns Tifa by the arm and practically hauls her upright. "Is it monthlies? You have to keep moving if it's monthlies. It just hurts worse if you stop."
It's not. Tifa usually doesn't get them. She mutely shakes her head and lets Hano drag her to sit on the wall, muttering about home remedies. "I'll get you to the farm," Hano is saying, "you can't be dropping dead in a ditch whatever's wrong with you," and what does it matter now? Truly, what does it matter? Theo's safe. Theo's gone.
She manages not to say any of it aloud.
--
The library stays open into the evenings, now. Little Amun is raising a rare crop of readers. Tifa hurries past. She won't go out of her way to avoid the place, but neither will she give anyone there an excuse to come out to talk.
--
So of course, the next evening as she's staring at the half a line of stitching she's managed to add to the festival tunic, Sakiya turns up.
Sakiya is carrying a basket. She has a shawl thrown over her neat white robe and an expression of intense nervousness. Tifa wants very badly to drop the curtain and ignore her, but she managed to light the lamp and it must be obvious she's home, and she didn't manage to start the oven and the basket looks like it's full of bread. It makes sense. Sakiya made up excuses all the time to bring Theo over for dinner, and send him home with the leftovers. In seven years she's never learned to halve a recipe. Her father, who used to be a merchant, has managed not to notice. The man must still feel guilty about the fire.
She makes herself walk the five steps to the door, and pulls back the wooden panel in three breaths.
Sakiya looks up at Tifa, takes a deep breath, and smiles. Her face is hard to make out in the dusk, and Tifa's one lamp doesn't reach this far. But the smile is unmistakeable. "I, uh, sorry to burst in on you this late."
"But you made too much bread?" Be gentle, Tfa tells herself, be kind, this is a girl hardly older than Theo.
(Theo, who she sent off to seek his fortune, who hasn't been a child for years, hard as it is to stop thinking of the boy she used to carry in a cloth on her back as anything but a baby.)
A swift shake of the head. "I made just enough." Sakiya says. "I was worried about you. I heard you collapsed on the road on the way to work yesterday."
Oh.
"Just a dizzy spell," Tifa says, and then, reluctantly, "Won't you come in?"
She can at least sit down, while Sakiya sets out the pile of buns. The bundle under her other arm turns out to be a wine jar, and Tifa blinks at it. She's had wine before, a few times. She drank it at Sinta's wedding, and at the party Tehichi's husband threw when their third son was born, and she even bought a jar for Theo's graduation. It had left them giggling. They'd poured a little into a saucer for the little white dualtail Theo brought back from the exam, after she sniffed at their cups as if she was judging the smell, and her little pink tongue flicking out to lap up the golden wine had struck them as the funniest thing in the world. This wine is red. Sakiya pours it into Tifa's teacups with steady hands.
Tifa takes half a sip. The last thing she needs right now is to lose her head.
Theo's friend takes a deep breath, and the next words she says come out in a rush. "You know if you need any help - " She breaks off, looking down at her knees. "I mean, I know you can take care of yourself but if - if you didn't want to stay up here alone - Are you just going to stay here?"
"What else would I do?" Tifa smiles. There's bread spread out on the table and she should probably eat it. As soon as her hands are steady.
"You could get married," Sakiya says eventually.
"What? Who to?"
"Daem Yappan, maybe?" Ganan's foreman? "He likes you. And he makes good money, you wouldn't have to work." Sakiya half-shrugs.
It's - not an idea that had ever occurred to her, and now that it's been pointed out, Tifa isn't sure what to think of it. She had never imagined living with anyone but Theo. She had never dreamed of her own children. She shrugs. "Does he like me that much?"
"He likes strong women. March up to him and ask and he'll be bowled right over and say yes." Sakiya offers a hopeful smile.
Tifa doesn't know how to answer that. She takes another tiny sip of wine.
"I mean, it's just an idea. You don't have to do anything right away. Or - do you want someone younger? Because there are half a dozen boys from Theo's class who would go for a three-year engagement, or there's Tehichi's oldest, he's seventeen, you wouldn't have to wait."
It occurs to Tifa that she is twenty-two. She takes a deep breath. "I don't mind waiting. I don't mind waiting forever."
"Oh," says Sakiya, as if the idea of someone who doesn't want to get married is a new and strange one. She looks down at her twisting hands. "Well - you could get a job in town? Be someone's cook and you could get room and board? It can't be nice living up here." In the slums, she is too nice to say. "And you wouldn't have to walk all the way to the tea garden every day."
"I don't mind walking."
"Father is looking for a new housekeeper," Sakiya goes on, as if that follows. "If you asked ..."
He'd hire her for Theo's sake.
Theo is gone.
"I don't want to decide anything right now," Tifa says. The lamp flickers and the uneaten bread glistens on the table between them. "Tell me, what kinds of books have you gotten in lately?"
It's an easy and obvious topic, and Sakiya always has the catalogue in her head.
--
Two days later she wakes in the middle of the night. She was dreaming, and the empty space beside her in their bed does her no favours, because the dream was of Theo dying on the road.
He is in Aftzaak, Tifa tells herself with no evidence, and presses her teary face into the blanket. He is in Aftzaak. Never mind how he got there. Never mind that she does not know that he got there. He is in Aftzaak and safe and happy and learning to be a kafna. There is no other way the world can be.
She rolls onto Theo's side of the bed and lies curled up, knees tucked against her chest, until morning, as if her monthlies were coming on and the cramping was too much to bear.
--
The library is open late. Tifa walks in, as if she had business there, and doesn't think of the festival tunic on her table at home, half-finished and almost late. She walks over to the desk where Sakiya and Tehichi are paging idly through the latest volume of something with a soft blue temporary cover. "I have a question," she says.
"Of course! The library is here to - Tifa?" Tehichi blinks at her, takes in the worn farm clothes and almost respectable headscarf.
Tifa takes a deep breath. It's a perfectly ordinary sort of question. "How much does it cost to send a letter to Aftzaak?"
Tehichi frowns in thought, but Sakiya must have been thinking along the same path, because she instantly answers, "Eighty quipu."
That's not nearly as much as Tifa had been afraid. Is the mail service subsidized? Theo would have known. He would have studied it. "And a scribe for a letter?"
There, she's as good as admitted it. It's common enough in Amun she can only hope they don't pity her.
Sakiya's nose scrunches up. "I'll do it for you for nothing. Friend of the library discount." Beside her Tehichi looks confused, but mercifully she doesn't ask any awkward questions, or any questions, or even make a noise. Sakiya goes on, "Do you want to write to Theo? Because so do I and we could put the letters together, they don't charge more for more pages, we could split the eighty quipu. It'd be easy." She trails a nervous hand down the desk. It's some dark wood, plain and undecorated like most of the library. Maybe the caretaker thinks the books, with their elaborate covers, are decoration enough.
Either Sakiya is being gracious, or she sincerely doesn't see anything to be ashamed of in the question, Tifa won't leave the gift on the ground. She nods. "That sounds like a fine idea. Should I come back tomorrow?"
"Oh, just come by the house. Father is meeting some out-of-town merchant and I might as well cook for four." She beams, settled and happy and so carelessly generous it makes Tifa's head ache.
--
She wakes up at her usual hour the next morning, rolls over in bed, and stares up at the narrow slice of clouds and sky she can see at this angle as it turns grey, then reddish, then yellow-blue, and the sunlight creeps across her bed, and she's going to be so late for work the supervisor is going to yell at her, there's no getting around it, but it's not as if the intensity of the yelling will be any worse if she just lies here for a little while longer.
She and Theo had not talked about the idea of letters. The idea of having to pay to have his thoughts read out in the dry voice of the village scribe, of having to answer herself the same way, no way to talk just to each other in perfect honesty like they used to in their bed late at night, talking each other to sleep - It had hurt too much to think about. It's only that never speaking to him again, even at a remove, feels worse.
It won't be so bad with Sakiya. Sakiya is a friend to both of them.
She gets to work eventually. The supervisor isn't even there, and he doesn't come back until she's deep in her teacakes, when he could hardly interrupt her without looking like a fool.
--
She doesn't bother trying for the farm. She goes home and stares at the unfamiliar patterns of the noonday light on her coverlet. Eventually she eats the last of Sakiya's honey rolls.
The festival tunic stares accusingly at her.
The light is good. Tifa knows how to make the best of things. With fingers that feel numb in the warm afternoon and hands that move as slow as tortoises, she picks up her needle and thread.
--
Dinner, for an important guest, is chicken with pomegranate sauce and yellow rice, food good enough for a wedding feast. In her shabby old clothes Tifa lets herself in the back door and waits in the kitchen, nibbling off the plate that's been left for her - the one with the chips in the glazing, so she knows it's not waiting for Sakiya'a father's guest. There's leftover rice on the stove and the teakettle is going cold and the teapot is missing. Tifa pours a little hot water into the mug with the missing handle and wraps her hands around it to ease her twinging muscles.
There's laughter somewhere. The sunset is turning the kitchen orange. If she got a job in town she could sit like this every night, listening to someone else's family laugh and knowing that her bed was just up the stairs, feeling the heat of a stove whose wood she hadn't had to gather.
Eventually Sakiya slips into the room. Her cheeks are flushed, as if they had her drink a toast with them before they sent her away to talk in private. She's clutching a plate with most of a drumstick still on it. "Oh, good, you found the plate," she says, as if there had been a question of it. "Do you want to come up to my room?"
"Alright," Tifa whispers. She's never been there before.
Sakiya's room is on the cool north side of the house, bigger than Tifa's room-and-a-half, and it has a writing desk in it. It has a bed, too, with a coverlet thick with embroidery, and a chest-of-drawers with a carved edge, and rugs on the walls, and a painted scroll of a tiger where a more devout person would keep an icon of Viracocha. The writing desk is what catches her eye. The books sitting at the back, stood up neatly between two stone endpieces. The grey-glazed inkpot. The blue-glazed jar with wooden pen handles sticking up from it. The blotting towel folded neatly into a square. The big, empty space in the middle. It looks like Theo's side of the table looked when he did his homework, except that his books were in a stack and his inkpot wasn't so nice.
"Tifa? Tifa, are you okay?" Sakiya is snatching the plates from her hands.
She has to be. She must not be if Sakiya is asking. She opens her mouth to form an answer and feels the tears slipping down her cheeks.
--
Aftzaak is nine days' travel away, for one rider on one horse. Less for the postal service, with their relays of couriers. How much less Tifa doesn't know.
The letters have to get there. Theo has to find the time to write back. The replies have to make their way to Amun. There will be another fee and she hopes it's no higher going the other way. Theo left with only five thousand quipu, and that only because Tifa would not let him leave empty-handed. It was not enough money to come home, but it would be enough to take a ferry back to Espleo and get a job there at the papermills, or to live on until he could find one of Ganan's old friends in the city, or -
Nothing is going to go wrong. Theo will be fine. Theo will be a kafna. In twenty days, maybe, she'll get his letter back and know that everything is fine.
--
She goes to the tea garden not too long after sunup. She pounds tea into cakes. She goes to the sheep farm. She cards leftover wool. She comes home, lights her stove, and makes tea.
The festival tunic is done. She brings it to Mihatla at the tailor's when she should be walking up to the farm, but the idea of carrying the damn thing that far is suddenly too much to bear. Mihatla looks it over, brows narrowed. "Took a while," she allows, "but you do good work. Thanks." She always says that, as if it were a favour.
And then she gives the lie to it by going over to her cashbox, which is tucked between a pile of cheap wool rugs and a pile of bolts of expensive dyed silk still on the bolt, and pulls out the price they'd agreed on, so long ago, back before Theo got his acceptance letter.
Tifa weighs the coins in her hand. The four thousand quipu are in small copper coins, fifties and hundreds, convenient since she'll be using them a few hundred at a time for flour and vegetables, and maybe spend some right here again for cloth, to sew herself a new underrobe. You can only wash something so many times. But for now - "Can I have a scrap for these?"
This is all part of their usual banter. Mihatla nods, fiddles around in the basket of cuttings at the end of her table and produces an irregular shape of blotchy brown fabric that looks like the leavings of fitted leggings, as if someone decided to get them pre-stained rather than worry about blood coming out. She drapes it flat with a fluttery no-you-go gesture. "Ugly stuff, isn't it? I don't know what Alhaz was thinking. He must have let his kids at the vats again. Keep it, I'd just have to sell it for cushion padding."
"Fine for linings," Tifa answers. Her hands dump the coins out onto the scrap, fold up the corners until they can knot together. "Or underclothes. At least it's soft."
"It's a waste of good wool is what it is. This could have been a lovely robe if it had stayed ivory."
"Maybe his kids are learning," Tifa says, with half a shrug. It's not like you can dye colours in the dirt until you know them well enough to use real cloth.
"Maybe he was drunk again." Mihatla rolls her eyes. "Anyway, I would have some linen for you to do shirts from, we'll need a pile for spring, but the damn caravan's three days late and nobody knows why. Can you come back in a few days?"
Tifa tucks the bundle of coins into the pocket of her skirt. It doesn't jingle.
Every time she picks up the cloth for her next sewing job she has to add up the price of thread in her head and add it to what she asks for wages. Coloured yarns cost. She's an adequate embroiderer, not a very good one, or she'd be working days in the shop by now instead of doing piecework in the evenings.
"I don't think I can take any more work for a while," she says. "Sorry."
Maybe it's a bad idea, but Tifa is so tired these days, and it's not much money after lamp oil.
In a little while the tea plants will start to grow again and she'll have to spend her mornings in the fields.
--
Sakiya has let her hair down. It's strange enough that when Tifa walks in, for a moment she wonders who the strange person is busy slipping books back onto the shelves, with hair hanging over her shoulders and no headdress at all. Then the person looks over he shoulder and smiles and turns into her friend. "Oh, I didn't know you were coming today," her friend says. "Sit down, I'll just be a little while."
It's not that odd, maybe. Sakiya is fourteen. She must be thinking about trying things out. Figuring out how she likes to look. Looking for a husband, maybe, if her father unbends enough to admit any boy in this little nothing-town could be good enough for his precious jewel. Acat might count if he finds a scholarly apprenticeship.
And why should Tifa think about such things? She sits down at the table by the window, and doesn't pick up the book left abandoned there, even to look more closely at its soft green cover and the embossed pattern of stars.
There's a kew laden with bundles of wood stomping down the street outside. Kew can never move without stomping, as huge as they are. This one has a reddish-orange hide, what she can see of it, a broken right horn and matching scar trailing up its crest.
Sakiya comes up behind her and makes a noise that might be a laugh. "Father always complains about kews in town," she says. "He thinks they're going to tear up the street. I guess it's a good thing he went home early."
"Mm." Tifa's not thinking about the street. "Do you know why icons of Viracocha always have a kew's head?"
"I - don't. Sorry." Sakiya bites her lip. "Father didn't bother much with religious education."
Being a completely neglectful Manacchan, Tifa isn't going to chide anyone for not bothering with Asin teachings. She shrugs. "He taught you more important things."
"Oh yes." Sakiya's face lights up. "I mean, I'm never going to meet Viracocha but I have to haggle at the market all the time. And I can keep the catalogue records for the library. And I can find things out for - anyone who can't. I just. Uh."
"What is it?" How can Sakiya be embarrassed in front of her, after she broke down crying in front of Sakiya?
"I just wish there were more girls here who could read," she bursts out. Oh. "There aren't even any girls in the school here. Father had to teach me himself. And in Aftzaak there are so many girls with so much education that people thought Theo was silly for trying to be a kafna. They say it's a woman's job! When Father set up the library it was four women kafna from the Central Library who came to help! And they told him to hire Tehichi so women would feel more comfortable using it, and ninety-three of a hundred books we lend out are to men. I've counted." Rant over, Sakiya takes a deep breath and sits down all at once like a dropped woolsack.
Tifa eventually offers, not sure if it will be comforting, "I wish I could."
"I wish you could too." Sakiya's smile looks a little forced. "It's really strange Theo never taught you. He used to teach the boys who were having trouble at school."
Tifa remembers that, remembers walking over to bring him lunch when school let out and finding him tracing shapes in the dirt with a stick, sounding them out, or making his eager audience try. It's strange she never asked. But Theo could read when he was five, and she is twenty-two and she has always been too busy for the attempt. "He had enough to worry about," she says. He was her little brother. Hers to look after, not vice versa.
The light is going as orange as the kew was. If she doesn't leave soon she'll have to light her stove by feel in the dark, but Tifa learned that trick long ago.
Eventually, idly twirling a lock of hair around her finger, Sakiya asks, "Do you maybe want me to teach you?"
"What?"
"I mean, I've never tried to teach someone to read before but I remember how Father taught me. You could be my test case. Maybe there are other girls who want to learn. Maybe if they learn that much their mothers will start thinking it would be worth it to send them to school." The expression on Sakiya's face is familiar. It's the same one Theo wore when he talked about going to Aftzaak and becoming a kafna and leaving her forever.
Sakiya isn't going anywhere. Her father is too contented here to leave, and Sakiya loves her father too much to so much as marry a boy from the next village.
"Let me think about it," Tifa says. She doesn't know, yet, if she has that much time. If it's worth that much effort.
--
Because there is another option, and it's the one that is keeping Tifa awake at night, lying on Theo's side of the bed by the window and watching the light of the two moons leave doubled shadows on the coverlet.
She could leave. She could go to Aftzaak.
It would take money, and a woman travelling alone is in constant danger, and she has no job waiting for her in the city. All those are solvable problems. Save up. Travel with a merchant caravan. Get Ganan and Sakiya's father to write letters of introduction to their city acquaintances, asking them to find her a position. And in four years when Theo is done his training - maybe even next year when he's picked an office, she doesn't know how these things go - she can live with him again, maybe they can even live together in the library complex, and she can get some menial job at the library. They must have work for strong hands even if she has no education.
Or don't. Keep a room of her own in the city, see Theo on his days off, and settle down and -
Do what, exactly? What has she ever wanted to be other than Theo's sister? The idea of being some man's wife, any man's wife, tastes like stale bread in her mind. She has no art that itches under her skin, the way some people are doomed to be weavers or carvers or wallpainters. She just gave up the closest she had in favour of getting more sleep. She'd be doing casual labour, just as she is now, maybe baking chapatti in the mornings and forming roof tiles in the afternoon. Filling up her days just to have a roof over her head that night.
A roof in Aftzaak, the City of Books.
Twelve years ago she came to Amun with a stick in her hand, a baby on her back, and no plans in her mind beyond a shapeless determination to survive. Simple, if not easy. Amun's not a bad place to live; there are people here prosperous enough to be kind. Tifa wonders if she would miss it.
She doesn't have to decide right away. Aftzaak isn't going anywhere.
She wraps up the nagging idea in that thought like a pile of coins in a scrap of cloth, and tucks it away to wait for daylight.
--