3. Child of Darkness

Child of Darkness


  • ((Events in the life of a girl who embraced the darkness in order to survive. No promises as to content, this is the story of a character to whom life was not kind for many years, and who struggles constantly not to let the line between the darkness and herself blur too much))

    The Whip

    CRACK

    The whip was short by the standards of those used to encourage horse and ox teams to movement on sultry days when they’d rather browse the hedgerows the wagons were passing, or stop altogether to doze. It was only six feet long, of well cured rawhide, woven in a six part pleat and finished at the end with a metal claw clasp designed to hold the fine leather thongs from parting as it was cracked. The handle was leather, woven round a core of maple wood. It fit the mans hand perfectly, the base of the handle lying along his wrist at the bottom end of the stroke.

    CRACK

    The whip had cost the man who now wielded it nothing. He’d won it in a card game from a gadje sharpster. It had originally been part of the man’s act when he’d been a travelling player. He’d split a card in half, or douse a candle, both held high by his assistant, a woman in too few clothes who’s job it was to keep very still. He was good though, he very rarely missed his mark and made good money. With the good money came the good liquor, with the good liquor came the loss of skill. One of life’s spirals.

    CRACK

    A drunk man who thinks he is cleverer than you is a Romany’s favourite sort of person in the world. A man who thinks he is cleverer than you is the perfect mark and a man who is drunk is easily fooled. Combine the two and within an hours play you can walk off with all the money the man has left, a pair of solid gold earrings and the whip he used to make his living in the first place. There is one born every minute, so the saying goes, and to a Romany who is smart and good with cards it is ever true.

    CRACK

    Anyone can crack a whip. It’s not so difficult, just a rolling flick of the wrist, send the length of leather away from you then send a jerk down it pulling it back. When the two forces meet the end of the whip moves very fast indeed and makes a noise. When used to make horses run or oxen walk that’s all you really need to know. How to make a noise.

    CRACK

    Using a whip to split a card, or douse a candle, though, that is skilled. And to use a whip to both make it’s sound and split flesh is something that takes practice. As time went on, the man who now wielded the whip had become very good at it. He practiced often. Not every night by any means, sometimes not for a week or two at a time, but eventually the urge to drink came on him and when he was drunk he liked to practice.
    Practice makes perfect, so it is said. He said it often enough to the figure on the floor. Practice. When the Gadje are drunk and happy, winning money off a foolish Romany drunkard, you practice. Hold to the shadows, no-one will be looking at you, they will be watching me, trying to see if I bluff or if I hold strong cards.

    CRACK

    Of course no matter what she did it was never enough. The drink flowed into him and the frustration boiled up. Why not a boy? Why a cripple? Mashkar le gadjende leski shib si le Romeski zor, went the saying in the Old tongue. When surrounded by the gadje the Rom’s only defence is his tongue. Why, when he worked so hard, and struggled so much, when he tricked and duped so many of the filthy Gadje and upheld the Roman way did the gods curse him with this useless lump. You are a punishment sent to me for something your mother did, he swore. I have been a good man, somehow your mother made you wrong and now I have a useless lump who eats too much and earns too little, isn’t that right?

    CRACK

    “Y–-y---yes D---d---d---da”


  • Perceptions of the Lost

    Itself.
    Not itself.
    Food.
    Danger.
    Shelter.
    Now.

    The litany of all that is left in the mind of the creature that was once a girl and now just is. The past is a fractured morass, safest ignored, and the future is meaningless. Hunger is real, pain is real, fear is real. And the trees are real.

    In times to come she will be looked at oddly for many reasons, but one of them will be the way she views trees. Before there were trees there was Mother. But mother is part of the past, part of the broken areas of her mind. Not broken because of any mental problems, but decayed and fragmented by neglect. Memory is mutable, malleable, it conforms to our current needs and rarely is an accurate representation of what happened. But ignored and neglected it becomes scattered. Fragments of misty truths, half-truths and vague recollections. And that’s only if you try and remember, it had been long since she had done so. And so there are the trees. They provide shelter, protection, sustenance sometimes. The provide her with her clothes, her nests (a new one each night, staying still would get her killed) and the provided a measure of solidity in a fluid world. Where others had friends, family, acquaintances, she had the trees. Anthropomorphism is not a word she’d have ever understood or been able to say, but it is fundamental to her feelings about the tree’s she passes each day as she moves through the trackless deeps. No names, that would be an absurdity, after all she couldn’t even remember her own, but personality becomes attributed at a subconscious level.

    Her clothes are a mass of repairs and expansions, she has grown, though she herself hasn’t noticed it. Leaves, web from the larger spiders used to stick them in place, make up the majority of what she now wears. When a hole wears or a seam gives, she adds to it. Grime, filth and mud are as much a part of her attire as her much repaired rags. They scatter her outline, make her harder to see in the dappled shadow world she inhabits now, and they cover her scent with that of the ground she moves over. The only bright things about her are the blades of the two short swords she still has bound at her waist, though they are only drawn at absolute need. She has become more skilled with them, life in the deeps has forced a lot of lessons on her that would have killed or broken a lot of much older and wiser folk. She is a survivor though, and when the hard winds blew she bent with them and learnt new ways.

    She pauses as skittering passes close by. A webber, one of the larger ones too. She’s not seen any of those in a long time, the spiders of the Deeps would normally have eaten one like this by now. Them or something worse. The woods are lighter here too and she doesn’t recognise any of the trees. That’s not unusual in itself, she moves a lot, ranging wide and far, covering more ground in the years she has been lost than most cover in a lifetime. But usually there is a feel to the woods that she recognises. If there is such a feeling here it is muted, faded. She tracks the spider, for a while, hoping to find it’s food store. They poison and wrap meat for later, and if you’re quick and stay away from the puncture wounds she’s found you can eat from their larders.

    Then she stops, totally still.

    She can hear something odd… something vaguely… voices… She has seen no living man or woman in a long time. Of course time has no meaning to her, to her it is today and it is her tenth birthday and the time between is all just ‘nowness’. She is afraid, but curious. She follows, keeping to the shadows, brushing fingers on the trunks of trees she moves close to. As they travel the woods become sparser. The temperature here is low, she has many extra layers of leaves stuck to her clothes, though she’d have been hard pressed to tell someone, were she to talk, when she started feeling the cold. The sun brightens through the trees and for a while her eyes sting. They adjust though and soon she smells burning, like when lightning sometimes hit a tree in the deeps, but more constant and less wild. The people she is following join others, and she swerves aside, avoiding the crowd of strangeness she now finds herself in.

    She approaches a wall, a wooden gate though she can’t remember it’s name yet, words will come to her in time, and she slips through it behind the returning men.
    She watches them move off, frozen by hints of recollection and memory. Held fast by vague tremors of fear, of longing. An old woman she had not noticed looks at her, stunned also by the creature she suddenly finds inside her camp.
    The two face each other for a long drawn out moment, the woman’s eyes wandering over the girl trying to decide if the nearby guards are needed to eject the feral wanderer. Then she notices the scarring and scans the face again, adding years and times of trouble to a remembered face. Six years ago, a Kumpania left in a hurry. There had been rumour of a run-in with Norwick’s Militia and the Camp would not tolerate any such overt troubles in Narfell. There had also been a girl. A small and weak thing then, cowed by her father the Oath-taker remembered. She flicked through her own memories, and few remembered better than she the names and faces of those that had stood before her and avowed their goodwill to the Camp. Then the name came to her.
    “Chakano?” she murmured to the terrified looking girl before her. The girl paused, about to flee but held by the word. She struggled to remember, she knew it meant something. It was a word as well as a name and it was the word that came to her first, a Romany word for a small thing of great beauty. She could not relate the word to herself, not then, but when she struggled to find a voice, made thick and hoarse with disuse, when she finally made her throat work the syllabul free, then the Oathtaker nodded with an odd smile. “yes… Chakano… ‘Star’...”


  • Survivor

    Still.

    No Breath.

    Hold to the darkness and it will pass.

    A scuff. A sniff as the beast tries to find her by smell.

    Smelling only dirt, grime, the detritus she lies in, it moves on slowly.

    She had lost all sense of time in the woods. She had no idea how long it had been, nor how far she had travelled. She knew she was deeper in the woods than anyone from… the place… what was it called? With the tents… And the ravines… Camp! She was further than anyone from the camp ever ventured. She had seen the great spiders some of the guards had spoken off back then. She stayed away from them, kept to the rock-walls and the shadows. They had a lot of eyes, but they seemed to miss her in the mottled shadows.

    That was long ago now though, she thought, days at least… or was it months? Here, in the deeper woods where the sunlight had to battle through a tight-woven canopy and only at noon did the woods really lighten with a greenish glow, here the beasts and things that hunted were worse. Far worse than those spiders, though there were spiders amongst them. The spiders here were bigger, their legs rough and covered in fibrous hairs, and they saw better in the gloom than she did. She’d almost been caught by them several times and her clothes… they were once a dress she was sure of it, though she couldn’t remember the colour… her clothes were torn and shredded from such encounters. Compared to some of the things out here though the spiders weren’t troublesome. They smelt bad, so you could usually tell where they laired except in the swampiest parts.

    Once the beast had moved on, and silence had filled the area for several minutes the girl pulled herself out of the leaf mould she was under. Thick dark mud from the stream banks marked her face in lines and swirls, her hair knotted with twigs and leaves. Her clothes were rags now, her boots shapeless leather. She followed the beasts back trail, found where it had left it’s last kill. She couldn’t make out what it had been, but she crouched over it, looking around briefly, listening hard in the darkness. She had disturbed the creature’s meal an hour before, accidental this time, though she’d done it in the past on purpose. The things… she had no word for them, having never seen one before and barely seeing them now, moved slower when partly full, but were still aggressive enough to chase her. She’d learnt to circle, lose her own trail and return to their last victims. One trick, one of several, that allowed her to eat. She had a pair of shortswords belted at her waist. She’d found them on a dead man some time ago and kept them. She used one now to cut a chunk of raw meat from the carcass and allowed herself a small grin. It wasn’t often she got to eat this much, sometimes days and days would pass when she could find nothing but some of the least chewy tree bark and water. She stifled the grin fast though. Teeth were white and whiteness showed in this gloom.

    Later, sated, she washed the blood from herself carefully in a nearby stream. She’d left a lot of meat on the body, but what else could she do. She’d tried keeping some with her once, but the smell and the blood just attracted predators. No, safer to eat fast, wash, reapply the mud to her pale skin, working it into the scars and making swirls and lines on the smooth areas, and then move on fast. Nothing lay dead for long out here. That’s why she ate so infrequently. Around here the predators ate, then the scavengers ate, and what they both mostly ate were the scavengers unlucky enough to get caught. She finished up by the stream and jogged off through the forest, putting distance between herself and the carcass.

    Darkness.

    As a child she’d grown to dislike the darkness. Not for any fear of things that went bump in it. She was not some superstitious Gadje. She knew the spirits were out there and she knew they watched over the Romany. How could you be scared of the familiar. She disliked the darkness because that’s when her father drank.
    But now, now things were different. Now the darkness was an ally, her friend. Not the way the tree’s were, She gave the tree’s names, made people of them in her mind. They were the only thing out here that didn’t try to kill her and eat her, so she made of them her new Familia. When she saw one sick or damaged she kissed it. It never made them better, but it made her feel better. No, the darkness wasn’t a friend in that way, it was closer, more nurturing. She slipped into it’s arms each night, found peace in it’s enveloping tendrils in the day. Like a mother to her… no that was wrong, mother never protected her the way darkness did, mother was too afraid herself… like a mother should be perhaps, it welcomed her and kept her alive.

    She froze completely, her mind running fast through the last few minutes to find out when she’d lost concentration. Losing concentration when moving around was a good way to die. The beasts, the spiders, the giant insects, they were all things others had nightmares about, but not the girl, to her they were like dogs, only dangerous if you messed up. There were other things out here though that did give her nightmares. Things you never saw straight on, that were as much part of the shadows and darkness as of the physical. They were the things that ate the predators, the scavengers and anything else foolish enough to let themselves be seen or heard. She’d seen them twice before she learnt, and both times it had been luck that saved her. The first, a pair of beasts with long ape-like limbs had come brachiating through the forest right into the path of the horrors before they had seen her. The second time she had seen a low slung scavenger beast hiding in the undergrowth just in time to stab it in the backside with a sword and send it running. They had chased it, leaving off their pursuit of her.

    But now she had let herself drift. She’d been trying to remember her mothers face. She was enjoying the feel of the darkness on her skin and it had reminded her of her mothers touch and she’d been trying to remember her face but it wouldn’t come.
    And now she was going to die. She was sure of it. The thing facing her was crouched low, looking her way she thought, though why she thought so wasn’t clear to her since its face was in deep shadow.

    She should have been paying attention, heard the silence. It was the silence that gave them away. Where they prowled, everything hid and held its breath. Now she held hers, but she knew it was too late. The thing was moving towards her. It moved in an almost humanoid way, seemed to be bipedal. Fear held her as much as instinct. She should run, sprint, try and stay ahead of the thing and hope for a miracle, hope it gave up the chase. Anything but just stand here. She felt her bladder let go as the figure stopped, sniffed and then charged screaming inhumanly.

    The scream broke her stupor. Not its scream, her own. She heard the noise before she realised it was her making it, and for the merest fraction of a second was confused by it. It wasn’t a scream of terror, but one of defiance. As the thing charged her muscles were her own again and she was damned if she was going to die now. She would go on. Living was all she knew, moment to moment, minute to minute, the constant struggle for enough food to stave off the cramps and enough water to keep her throat from drying. The hunt for a place she felt secure enough to sleep in a place where the tree’s and the ground both served as homes and hunting grounds for things as big or bigger than her, venomous and hungry things. She didn’t know how long she’d been in the forest, because time didn’t mean anything here unless it was cut small enough. One minute. The unit of life she lived by here. She didn’t know what it meant to die, but she knew she had to make it to the next minute and she was not going to let fear stop her.

    It charged, and she dived straight at it. As she did she pulled the rough looking swords from their scabbards. This wasn’t a fight. A fight was something she couldn’t afford out here. She was too weak to win anyway, but to win without being wounded was impossible and a wound bled, would draw the hunters to her. She didn’t dive at it to fight it, she dove at it to surprise it. And she dove low, sliding between it’s legs.
    As she passed through she slashed each side with her swords. One bounced off the tough hide, the other bit, cut, and dark blood fell and hissed on the fallen leaves.
    Then she was up and running, the creature screaming and in pursuit. It was slowed though by the wound in it’s leg, didn’t have it’s usual speed and she was staying ahead of it, perhaps even pulling away. The flight itself could kill her too though, one slip, a broken leg and it was over, and this deep in the woods had no paths.

    She needed a plan and none came to her. She was alive, another minute, now she had to make it to the next one. The blood dripping from her left hand sword was her only new resource and flicked the blade as she ran sending droplets into the low branches.
    She cut a hanging vine as she sprinted past it as well, anything to change the environment she ran through to the one it did, anything to create a delay for it and more distance for her. The vine parted, the twisted, lightning blasted limb of the tree on which it grew creaked, twisted, separated from the main trunk and crashed down behind her. Not predictable, certainly nothing that had crossed her mind. Luck. Some of the Gali worshipped a goddess called Tymora, said she was the goddess of luck. The Rom were more skeptical, you made your own luck and when good things happened to you, thanks were given to all the gods. The limb crashed down onto the creature, and it skull burst with a last scream and then a foul stench.

    She knelt over the body. So, they could be killed. She’d not known that before, never seen a dead one. Not that that was surprising in this place, but good to know they bled and died. She cut a strip from its body, sniffed it. It smelt foul but she ate it anyway. It tasted worse. Out here though food was food. Out here you were the eater or the eaten. And she was a survivor.


  • Birthday

    The brown haired girl sat in the dark corner of the room and fidgeted. She had been excited for weeks about today and really didn’t want to spend the end of it in this cramped wooden house waiting to collect things for her father. The room was far too hot, a reaction she assumed to the intense cold outside. Narfell, not the nicest of places, but one of the best receptions they’d had in a while. The Travelling Folk were often shunned and despised but here there was an odd respect. Not universal, and they weren’t liked by any means, but they were treated almost as if they had a right to be there. The Camp was the reason for that of course, and a more beautiful, if still rather cold, place Chakano had not seen in a years or two.

    That morning she had emerged from the Wagon into the dawn light, her dress firmly buttoned up of course but for once grateful for it’s warmth, with a woollen shawl wrapped round her. She’d moved through the ancient Camp, looking at the huge tree’s and the deep ravines and marvelled as she had on many days, at the idea of a static encampment of the Romany. And yet this place had been here for more centuries than the oldest Elder could remember, her mother had said so. She waved to the Oath Taker shyly, the kind woman was one of few she had ever met who sometimes took the time to stop and talk to her, and more rarely still to wait whilst she struggled through an answer to a question. The entire Kumpania had arrived here two weeks ago and the Vaida had decided they would remain here a few weeks, to allow for wagon repairs, for Thelliana to have her baby and for the Wedding of Tulmo and Brienna. But today was a different celebration, one to which the young girl did not expect many to pay much attention, but to whom it was special none-the-less. Today she would no longer be a child. She would not be an adult for several more years, but she would no longer be considered too young to help the Kumpania, would be given tasks and chores. Many non-romany children would look upon her eagerness as foolishness. Why desire to move from the freedom of childhood into the drudgery of chores and work? But to Chakano it was important. The Kumpania considered her Dili still, retarded, broken and of little use, and before this day she had had no way to prove different to them. From this day onwards she would be given tasks, even if they were the most menial and easiest anyone could think to give her because of her status. And with a task given she could show her worth by completing it well. She would be able to show that speaking so poorly did not mean she was stupid, did not mean she was worthless. Her father’s anger and her mother’s pity had taught her long ago that she would never amount to a great deal, that she should never aspire to marry, to have a Familia of her own, but with the coming day she would be able to show them she could at least be a valuable member of this Familia, this Kumpania.

    She had walked the dawn woods, watched the other families awaken and begin their chores, waved even to some of the children, children who did not come from her own Kumpania and so did not instantly shun her company. She had decided she should collect the morning water from the stream. No-one had told her to, but Mother did it every morning and with Kish now toddling Chakano had decided she would choose her own first chore and do it well, so she could see her mothers smile, and maybe even a rare one from her father, he had not been drinking last night after all.

    She struggled back to the Wagon. The water bucket never looked so awkward when her mother carried it, nor did she make it look so heavy. She had slopped some on her clean dress but had hiked the shawl high so it would stay dry. Her mother was up and looking worried, Kish held in her arms, but her face brightened when she saw Chakano returning. She frowned a little at the sodden patch on her daughters dress, but with a glance towards the wagon fixed a smile back on her face. ‘Come now, we will bake the Mariki for your birthday, my little kocho.’ My little button, the name she only called her when her husband was asleep.

    It had been a good day. Father had slept late despite his sobriety and the Mariki had been sweet and good. In fact she had a piece hidden in one of the secret pockets in her dress. And now here she was waiting for the Gadje men to get drunk enough she could go about her business. It seemed a rich house, considering the local populace was half barbarian. Her father had met these men in the inn, the Boar’s Head and had baited and lured them in as always with his dumb-Romany act. What Gadje could resist fleecing an itinerant wanderer without the wits to stay sober out of his hard stolen coin. They saw themselves as a wolf-pack bringing down a foolish deer, but he saw himself as the wolf and they were just sheep. They were both wrong of course. They were all wolves, and she was the sheep, but the sheep would be the one to walk away with all the gold and valuables the house held this night. And now was the time, her father had lost another hand, barely, and a mound of his gold was now on their side of the table, they all had another drink and laughed and he laughed along with them, still playing the merry idiot. She slipped away from her corner and out of the room on her tip-toes and moved through the house. As she went she took the Mariki from her pocket and ate it, celebrating the last half hour of her tenth birthday as she collected shinies for her Da.

    Forty minutes later she was back in her corner, her father noted her presence and politely declined another hand, saying he would quit whilst he was ahead, and by this time he always was, marginally. He considered it a matter of pride to win, but a matter of foolishness to make the Gadje angry by winning a lot.

    After the walk back through the frozen snows of the Nars pass the warmth of the wagon was bliss on her fingers and toes. She stood quietly as he helped himself to the contents of all her pockets, piling the objects and coins on the table with unsteady hands, the smell of ale and liquor on his breath. As he fished coins from the last pocket she struggled for a deep breath and managed the G–-g---g--- of goodnight before his fist caught her across the face. She was stunned. This had been the biggest haul she had ever managed, it had to be enough. The Gadje household had been rich, well appointed, the security designed as ever to stop people getting in, not to stop them leaving with things once they had. Her father however was holding a handful of coins, and amongst them some slivers of the flaked pastry of her Mariki. He glared, he rarely shouted, but he reached the whip down from it’s place on the wall as he explained in cold, slurred words, what a waste she was, how he wished he had drowned her when he first saw her, how any idiot even a gadje could not fail to see mariki crumbs all over his house and add up two and two, about how she was worse than useless, less valuable than a mongrel dog who could at least bark a warning. He made her take off the dress, and as she huddled on the floor on all fours he showed her that a day, one day, going from nine years old to ten, did not change so much. He showed her finally with whip and words that her life was what it was and that it would never amount to more.

    When he was finally asleep she pulled on the dress, the only clothes she owned after all, took the last of her birthday mariki and crept out of the Wagon. Her back was stiff and sore, dried blood welded her dress to her before she’d gone far. The Camp dogs growled, but settled when they saw her, she had been petting and feeding them since the Kumpania’s arrival. She looked back at the wagon just before the gloom of night swallowed it. At the only home she had known. She thought of her mother and sister and almost turned back. There were no tears though, she had not cried since she was six, it only made him hit her harder. Somewhere inside her something broke, perhaps forever, and she turned and slipped into the trees, vanishing into the darkness, willing it to swallow her so she would no longer shame her family with her worthlessness.
    Without a sound the darkness took her, absorbed her, a welcoming cool on her burning skin, and then she was gone.


  • The Loss if Innocence

    It was probably the wagon that kept her alive. A gaudily painted wooden home on wheels. It was of middling size for the Kumpania, not one of the single person wagons given to son’s until they wed. A family wagon in which she lived with her parents and her little sister. If it had been one of the bigger wagons, those used by the wealthier Rom, those with more sway with the Elders and the Vaida, the chief, of the Kumpania, then he’d have been able to get a decent backswing on the whip. It was said that twenty lashes, proper lashes with the freedom to build decent speed, could kill the strongest man if he weren’t tended to fast.
    She was sitting on the steps of the wagon now, as it sat in a wide grassy field above the village of Endemere. It was a hot day, the other children of the various Familia were running round in their underthings or naked. Gadje liked to think themselves superior, to look at the dirty children running around naked and believe it was because the Rom were so poor and pathetic. The truth was simpler and yet more complex. In each wagon were clothes for each of the family members who’s richness of fabric and cut and embroidery would match the finest in the courts of Gadje kings. No Rom would ever wear such in front of Gadje though. Their finery was for their own revels. The weddings and births, the funerals and wakes, the betrothals and twinings of this Familia with that. The children ran about grubby and naked because it was hot, because naked skin getting wet didn’t stain and take on watermarks like cloth did and because mud washed off skin more easily than off cloth. Practical reasons.
    The Gadje looked down on the Rom for the same things the Rom looked down on the Gadje. Where one say itinerant wastrels, thieves and the poor, the other saw freedom, tradition, and their own laws.
    Of course Chakano wasn’t naked, nor even stripped to just her underthings. She wore a high necked, long sleeved dress that reached her ankles. Her mother dressed her this way with a worried smile, telling her it was better this way, that they needed the Kumpania and that the Kumpania might not understand.
    Chakano knew it was because she was bad she had to wear the dress, and the stockings and boots beneath it. If she was better at her tasks she wouldn’t have to. Not her chores and the like, these were women’s work overseen by her mother, and if she was a little slow, or got confused her mother just sighed and smiled and helped her. It was her other tasks she kept getting wrong. Her night-time tasks for her father.

    When she was two and still not speaking properly her parents had taken her to the Temple of a town they were passing through. The Priests had said that they could not heal whatever was wrong and her father had cursed his luck, luck that had given him a daughter not a son and one that was dili, retarded, at that. Two years later, after he had begun drinking, he came up with his new ploy to fleece the gadje. “No-one pays any attention to a small girl too stupid to be left in the wagon when her father goes to drink and play cards” he had said. And so he had begun to teach her to steal. He didn’t call it stealing, his contempt of Gadje was so strong he saw it as moving the precious objects hidden in their homes to their rightful place in his hands, and so she didn’t think of it as wrong. He played cards and drank, she wandered the house collecting the shinies for him. “Bring me enough shinies from these gadje bastards and we will live like kings and you can be my little princess!”

    So she did. Always she brought everything she could find that glinted, and always he was drunk by the time they got home, and it was not enough. And so she gathered more, and he called the more junk, not fit to fill a pigsty. Only the shiny things mattered he told her.

    She sat on the wagon steps and watched the children play. They never played with her. Never asked her to join in their games. Once they had mocked her, made fun od how she spoke. Called her D–-d---d---dili. A nickname she hated. As her fathers drunkenness became more frequent, as the whip saw more use, and as she had to always wear the long dress, they drifted away. Their parents were not wholly oblivious to the situation. No close-knit community could avoid some speculation as to why the strange quiet girl with dark eyes was always dressed too hot for the Lungo Dromo where it passed through the southern Dalelands. If they had truly known how bad things were, they might have acted, but her mother smiled to them, and showed them how happy she was and how happy her daughter really was. And after all, she had the new baby as well, so they must be a happy family.
    The children though were less astute but far more wary. They didn’t know what it was that made them back off these days, though the girl seemed odder, even quieter, than she used to. Maybe it was the look in her eyes as she stared into the middle distance, never quite focussing on them, or maybe it was her father, the once-bear of a man, shrivelled by the liquor and hardened by it, made bitter by his perceived misfortunes.

    It didn’t matter. She sat alone and watched the children. Wondered what it would be like to be allowed to laugh and play with them. Knowing that if she tried they would stop and watch her, wait for her to struggle through the simplest sentence and then quietly move off and start the game again, away from her. She hated the dress for it’s heat, the itchiness of her sweat as it ran down the scarring on her back. But she loved it too, it was made for her by her father, the man who held her heart in his hands and could choose whether to brighten her whole world with a kiss to her forehead and a quiet “Well done”, or could crush it with a length of leather when she failed to do the simple thing he asked her. Collect enough. She ran her hands over all the hidden pockets in the dress, and in the bottom of one found a bright gold coin.
    She was about to run into the Wagon, to wake her father from his stupor, to struggle with the words, to make him see that she –had- brought more, that maybe she –had- brought enough last night and maybe she hadn’t needed to bleed. She knew he would be sorry, would tell her how proud he was of her and give her a hug.

    But she stopped. She hesitated, then shielded the coin from her mothers view, where she sat suckling the infant. Instead she slipped it into her hidden pocket again. Who knows she thought, maybe one more coin tonight will be enough. She knew he couldn’t un-beat her from last night, but maybe, just maybe, that one extra coin would keep the whip from her back tonight.