My mother tended to the springs of conception and abortion for a thousand years. Then she passed them to me.
Some said that between the bookstore and the steel factory on Seventh Street stood a bathhouse that hosted the miracle waters of life and death, the last relic of the Kingdom of Women. Others swore that they had a sister or niece or friend who’d become saddled with a pregnancy she did not want, and disappeared into the city’s northern quarter and returned cleansed of the fetus. Still others insisted that the long life bathhouse could never be sought, and never mapped, only found.
They were all correct, of course.
Ikka found me as I was folding towels in the foyer. She was stitched from burlap, but the lanternlight cast her in gentle orange as she settled upon my knuckles.
“There is someone coming soon,” Ikka chirped, splaying her wings for emphasis. “Coming soon, Aijira.”
I ran a finger over her thread crest. Her resultant coo blended into the background lullaby of running water. “Thank you for telling me. You should hide yourself before she arrives.” I raised my voice, called to the other spirits I knew were hiding just out of view. “That goes for the rest of you, too! If you have nothing to do, the tiles always need scrubbing. Yes you, Mask-Face.”
A shuffling sound escaped from the left hall, the sound of many spirits scrambling over each other, pretending they hadn’t been eavesdropping. I smiled to think of Crane and Mask-Face pushing past the river spirits in their haste.
True to Ikka’s heralding, the bell above the door tinkled not a few moments later. It must have been cold outside, for the visitor to be clutching her shawl so tightly around herself. Still, the damp heat of the bathhouse had already melted the residual frost, and it seeped into the shawl’s embroidered threads. Her cheeks quickly flushed.
“Is this the long life bathhouse?” she said. Her voice quavered like a plucked string. “I was told to look for the house with the eight-knobbed door, but I wasn’t sure. I’m really sorry if not.”
“It is,” I said. I set the last towel on the wooden rack and straightened.
She looked surprised to behold me in full. “Oh! I wasn’t expecting you to be so young. I thought you would be old like the wrinkly women in the mountains, but you’re more like a little sister.”
“It’s all the steam,” I demurred, but her words secretly pleased me, vain, timeless thing that I was. “It keeps my skin smooth.”
She nodded, and loosened her shawl. “Might we all be blessed with such good health.”
“You’re hurt,” I said, noticing the bruising along her newly-exposed arms.
“Met some soldiers on the way here.”
I shuddered, remembering how those metal-clad men were on the rare occasions I entered the city to fetch supplies or meet with lovers: the roughness of their voices, the entitlement with which they gripped me, asked me for authentication.
I wondered, as I did for all our visitors—who was this woman outside these condensation-webbed walls? A potter’s daughter? Or perhaps a servant to one of the gleaming manors up on the hills? I had long stopped trying to guess which of the two halls I would lead them down, whether they wanted to take on a pregnancy or terminate one.
But she answered for me. “I’m not here for myself. I have—a friend. She needs to see you.”
“She’ll find us,” I replied. The bathhouse always made itself known to those who needed it.
She shook her head. “The Governor took her to his prison. She’s pregnant.”
Before she made her way to the Kingdom of Women and presided over its miracle waters, my mother made her home in the Caves of Singing Echoes. She was a spider demon, one of those immortals about whom men tell tales to rationalize their most syrupy desires, the ones they bury beside the shame. A heartless, heartless woman.
They made myths and rituals out of venturing into the Caves of Singing Echoes, the lair of the monstress. Those who stumbled out alive spoke feverishly of a songstress’s voice weaving through the drip-drip-drip of trickling water, the pitter-patter of spiders always just out of view. They claimed they saw a woman’s reflection in the water, and she was beautiful enough to make the moon hide her face in jealousy.
The stories of my mother’s bloodlust are, for the most part, true. She told me how she would wrap her victims in silk before sinking her venom into them, and we would giggle together, imagining the open-mouthed horror of those men who entered the caves believing they would emerge with an immortal slung over their shoulder.
There was another story of her time in the caverns she only ever told me once, though, many years after the fact.
She had thought she was very clever: she used a single silk thread from her navel and wove interconnected webs across the entrances of many tunnels, so that when a fool wandered into any of them, she would feel it as a tug in her stomach. When I asked whether that would punish those who might have wandered into the caverns without malice, she gave me a melancholy smile.
For there had been such a night, when the thread had tightened and she knew she had caught another. But when she hurried to her victim, mouth already watering, she had not found one of those men who came with their axes and halberds. Wriggling against the silk bindings, gasping for air, was a woman, belly swollen with child.
The woman did not survive. And so, my mother told me, she never wove a web again.
Then she shook her head, and the melancholy cleared from her expression like smoke before a persistent breeze. She knelt beside me, taking the scrub brush from my hands, saying put a little more weight into it, Aijira darling.
The spirits of the bathhouse converged upon me when I stepped into the bathhall.
There was Ikka, alighting on my shoulder. The river spirits as well, waddling to me, leaving tiny wet footprints in their wake. Mask-Face peeled herself from the rough, sweating fabric of the walls; tonight, the opera mask that perpetually obscured her face was painted in a wide, somewhat eerie, smile. And Crane simply emerged from the shadows: dark feathers, a teapot lid atop his head, a necklace of coins strung around his neck.
I knelt by the bath, clutching an old silk sack that had been my mother’s. I’d gotten the finer details of the visitor’s request and then bade her to leave, reassuring her that I would do for her friend what I could.
“You’re not thinking of going?” Ikka said. “Think, Aijira.”
I dipped the sack into the waters, which were warm and lapping against my skin. They were only potent when fully submerged, and the waters of abortion would have no effect on me anyway. I was more careful with the waters of conception. “The woman can’t reach us,” I said. “I have to go to her.”
“It’s dangerous,” one of the water spirits gargled.
“It is,” I said. Dangerous, and unprecedented. Not even my mother had taken water from the springs to be used elsewhere.
Before I could strain to pull up the sack, now filled with water, Crane reached over my shoulder and took the silk in his beak, holding it as Mask-Face tied it off with a length of string she produced from one of her robe’s infinite pockets. I murmured my thanks when he handed it to me.
Still, Mask-Face said in her whistling voice, “Your mother—”
“My mother is no longer with us,” I said, and the spirits of this place knew better than to argue with me about what she would have wanted. They accompanied me to the door, brought me a cloak and dried persimmons for the journey.
“Send one of us instead,” Mask-Face tried.
I smiled helplessly at the coterie arrayed before me, the water spirits marbled with the lanternlight, reflecting all shapes of dappled light across the others, all these creatures who had fought back the loneliness and grief of my mother’s passing. “How could I?”
I knew to hide my fear from them. This was not one of my daytime forays, blending into the safety of a crowded street. If I was my mother, I’d be armed with venom and fangs, but I wasn’t so gifted.
Still, I pressed my hand to the damp wall, and hoped that some of her strength ran in me. Then I said my goodbyes.
As I stepped through the door and into the city beyond, the sound of jingling coins trailed behind me, and I knew the cause even before I turned.
Crane had followed me. His long stilt legs cast longer shadows across the cobblestones. Smoke singed my nostrils; there was a steel factory nearby.
“You’re coming with me, old friend?” I murmured.
He nodded, a polite dip of his beak. The coins clanged around his neck.
“Stay to the shadows, and stay silent,” I told him.
His yellow eyes gleamed before he sank back into the darkness.
When I turned back, I could barely make out the shape of the bathhouse against the smoke and the stars.
The day after she caught the woman in her web, my mother left her caves for the Kingdom of Women. It was curiosity more than regret that spurred her: the woman had been pregnant, but my mother could tell from the corpse that no man had ever touched her. So who had given her the child? My mother found papers marking the woman as a traveler from the Kingdom of Women, and took it upon herself to discover what strange magic had produced this conception.
Before she left, she extracted the half-formed thing from the other woman’s stomach. Not knowing what else to do, the guilt of her unintended killing still a complicated tangle in the back of her mind, she wrapped the bloody mess in a sac of silk and strapped it to her back before setting off.
Unacquainted with the shape of the world, she wandered in the vague direction of the Kingdom of Women, along the Macaque’s Road and its many daughter branches that wound through as many kingdoms, sampling local delicacies, smoked jellyfish and marrow cakes, and laughing to herself at wildly inaccurate tapestries of the immortals.
It was all brighter than she’d expected from her cave. Crueler, too: four little girls shoving the fifth into a river; drunk men laughing about all the pleasures they would solicit from their wives; a mother yelling at her son why she carried him in her belly for nine months only for him to be so ungrateful. The last comment made my mother wonder at the silk sac, which had been growing heavier over the years but still not formed into a child.
She asked a local midwife if such a length of time was proper for the gestation of a child, and how much longer she should expect to wait, but the midwife spat at her and told my mother to stop wasting her time, any child would’ve been dead.
My mother ate her for dinner. She licked the blood from her lips, pulled the sac tighter against her, and kept walking.
When I asked, years later, if the load was ever too heavy, she laughed and said she could have carried a hundred of them. She was an immortal, after all!
In fact, she walked eight years and eight months before she saw two huntresses squabbling over a felled stag. They stopped when they noticed my mother.
You must be tired, traveler-friend, they said. If you keep walking past the next ridge, you’ll find the sanctuary you seek.
My mother continued on, and couldn’t help her astonishment when she saw the stacked-houses glowing in the sunset, the young girls chasing each other between market stalls, laughter pealing across the white cobblestones, hair flowing like ribbons in the wind, unbound. She had reached the Kingdom of Women.
I walked the streets of the city with practiced indifference. Little remained here of the time when this land was called the Kingdom of Women, before it was only another territory of the Radiant Empire. The famous stacked-houses had been dismantled. Even the more derelict doors were carved with the family name of the house’s master. The market’s shape had changed too, the vendors with new faces selling wares made of glass and porcelain from across the land, though there were always women who recognized me without saying so, who relented a bit more easily when I haggled.
Ahead, a man clapped his fellow on the back and offered to pay for the first drink of the night, perhaps at that bar where the girls dressed like the demons of folklore? Had he seen the scorpion demon in her glittering black silks, or the fox spirit girl whose breasts had such a delicious heft to them? I kept a careful distance; the night wasn’t dark enough to provide cover.
Silver light spilled from the alchemical lamps, accompanied by the ever-present scent of burning metal. I doubted the soldiers stationed at intervals even noticed. The metal was in them, silver inlays in sharp angles along their necks, the radicals for might, discipline, radiance carved into their arms.
“You, woman,” one said, gripping my wrist too tightly. I held my breath so not to cough at the burnt metal smell of him. “What’s that? It better not be more of your mystic herbs.”
“Mushrooms for my son’s manhood ceremony. It’s pungent, so I tie the bag tightly,” I said, and he shook his head when I offered to show it to him.
“Don’t spill it,” he said.
Purple pooled beneath my skin when he let me go. My mother had always sighed about how easily I bruised, wondering how I could be so delicate and reckless at once. I let my sleeve fall back over the wound.
As I climbed, the shacks of the lower city refined into the courtyard houses of the elite, my company transitioning from the drunkards stumbling from the pleasure houses to the newsboys running to and from the printers, frenzied in the few hours we had before the morning papers were to be delivered.
My shoulder ached from the weight of the water when I reached the courtyard house of the Governor’s captain. Courtyard houses were a Radiant invention, injected into our streets—what use would the Kingdom of Women have had for such a strict delineation of space, the first wife in the western wing and the lesser wives in the east? But their predictability was useful in this case, for me to steal through the vessel alleys to the corner room, where the matriarch of the house was said to live.
Someone I had known, once.
I rapped my knuckles against the window, watching the mouth of the vessel alley for passing soldiers.
“Isongo?” I called softly. “Isongo, I need your help. It’s Aijira.”
For a few moments, silence. I tensed, ready to run if the alarm bell rang out. Then the screen door slid open.
From entering the Kingdom of Women, it didn’t take long for my mother to find the springs of conception and abortion.
By then, she had come to see all the ways in which the Kingdom of Women was imperfect: how it, for all the nobility of its mission, fell short in the ways other kingdoms fell short, in the ways humans could not escape their natures. And still, the sight arrested her: twin springs, with such a purity of color she half expected some divine artist to dip his brush into the pools to paint the sky. The waters ran in discordant harmony; the scent of sulfur tinged the air, grounding the mirage.
My mother gazed out at the scene, cerulean water beneath a cerulean sky, and pulled her silk sac tighter to her; she thought she could feel the heartbeat against her breast, but perhaps it was only her imagination.
This is your home, she thought. This is the birthright I tore you from, bloody and dripping in viscera.
She was surprised to see a woman standing sentinel over the waters, the crest of the Kingdom of Women proudly emblazoned across her sleeve.
“Why do you guard these springs?” my mother asked.
The sentinel told her: in the neighboring kingdoms, the manhood ceremony where boys became citizens consisted of a task to travel to the Kingdom of Women, and take something of theirs. The sentinel had speared many such a boy. Besides the disrespect, if they gave water to every questing hero, there would not be enough left to bathe in.
My mother listened, and she thought of a set of caves a world away, and the men who stepped into them just to prove that they could, for their rituals and their games. She thought of the heartbeat in the sac.
“Let me help you,” she said.
“It’s heartless work,” the sentinel replied.
“I’m well suited.”
The sentinel relented, and when the decades slipped away like the falling of autumn leaves, my mother became the lone guard of the springs of abortion and conception. She tore apart the men who came for violence; she tended to the waters. The sac slung across her body grew heavier and heavier, until one day it split open and I was born.
At first, I was sure that the stooped woman standing in the shadow of the courtyard house was some old housekeeper sent to fetch me. She could not be the shopgirl who had made eyes at me for years before asking me if I wanted to come see their newest shipments in the backroom, looking up at me slyly through her lashes.
But—weren’t those the eyes that had been innocent one moment, wicked the next? Wasn’t that the same sweet shape of the mouth that had discovered the all the vulnerabilities of my body, mapped them as I gasped against her, in those summers made of clandestine twilights and half-spun dreams?
Isongo. The name still unspooled across my tongue like a melody.
She stepped from the house; I shouldn’t have expected her to invite me in. The silver light made her silver hair all the starker; it was tied in the mandated Radiant loops, but I remembered running my fingers through it when it ran thick and wild as spilled ink.
“What could you want from me?” she said, her voice cracking in places it had not when I loved her, and still I wanted her to say my name back to me, clear as nightingale song. “You, the keeper of the long life bathhouse?”
“I want to know the guards’ schedules at the Governor’s prison.”
Her lips thinned into a line. “And you are asking me because we were once—close?”
“I am asking you because you married the Governor’s captain.”
She did not recoil from the shame. Her jaw was set, as defiant as all those years ago when I had stopped her hand unbuttoning my shirt, reminded her that the Radiant Emperor had forbidden such intimacies between women that distracted from the family, and she announced that she didn’t care.
With the same heat, she said, “I didn’t have a choice, did I? He wanted me. He was rich enough to send my brother to school.”
“I know,” I murmured. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t regret it.”
“But don’t you hate them, too?” I said.
She looked away.
Framed against the courtyard house, Isongo was only a collection of harsh angles, but for the loops of her hair. I wouldn’t know how to fit my hands against her now.
“Why are you here?” she asked quietly. “You don’t need my husband’s secrets, not really. Not when you have those spirit-creatures at your disposal.”
“I came to ask you,” I replied. Let us both pretend I was here for information; I couldn’t look directly at the sun.
I watched her swallow, transfixed by the movement of her throat’s withered muscles.
I couldn’t resent her; I saw in her etched wrinkles a lifetime of submitting to a bridle she had insisted, with the righteousness of youth, she would never accept. But youth was effervescent, and the Radiant Kingdom offered unity, prosperity, their brilliant metallurgy. All it asked was that we cut our hair in their styles, make our homes in their much more efficient housing architecture.
A fair trade.
As I slipped back into the main artery of the street, the guards’ schedule held fast in my mind, I heard the rustle of feathers, the faint chime of coins. I didn’t look back.
“Do you regret her?” Crane murmured from the shadows.
He was talking about the time Isongo had visited the bathhouse.
It had been a shock. To see the woman I had known so tenderly slink into the bathhouse and explain that her husband was infertile, but she would be blamed if they did not produce a child, that was the way of Radiant medicine.
She had clasped her hands together, and asked me to understand. I remembered when those hands had touched me with the reverence men save for their god-emperors.
I helped her. Of course I had helped her. I led her to the bathhall of conception, and wiped my tears away by the time she reemerged, both of us pretending we were happy at how each of our fates had unfurled away from the other.
I hadn’t realized decades had passed since then.
“I don’t,” I told Crane.
He huffed. “Too soft.”
My mother told me I was a particular baby.
“But then, I was an untrained mother,” she mused.
How foolish, she thought when the baby wailed and wailed, unreasonably irresponsive to her attempts at placation, to think that I could raise a daughter.
She knew I wasn’t a typical human, that the years maturing inside her sac had given me the flush of immortality—and yet, I could not be more foreign to her. It made her despair. The impossible riddle: how could bloodied hands and jagged fangs nurture tender flesh and soft bones? She lacked that innate compass human mothers had nestled deep within them; she felt the gaping absence every time she should’ve known the right method to teach me to speak, should’ve known whether to cajole or wait out my toddler silences.
“How did you decide to have a daughter?” she asked a returning visitor. “Did you simply know?”
The other woman shook her head. “I’ve always wanted daughters. When I had Aranying, I spoke with the others of my stack-house whether we could support another child, and we agreed.”
“Are you ever afraid of ruining her?”
“Every day,” she said.
But my earliest memories of my mother are not of incompetence.
The first memory I have is of the last spring of my girlhood when I shuffled up to my mother, hugging a teapot to my chest. The humble teapot housed a crane chick inside, you see; I explained to my mother that the crane’s parents had tossed him from the nest, runt that he was, and I wanted him to live with us.
“He could be a demon,” my mother said, unimpressed. “He could be one of the pets of the great gods in the west, or an escapee of the jade emperor’s menagerie, and he could stick his beak through your throat in your sleep.”
More importantly, she wanted to teach me that the world was cruel, that it did not have the same respect for life as its gentlest inhabitants. The young that didn’t weather nature’s inevitabilities, and become hardened, didn’t survive.
“Mama, please. I’ll scrub the rocks in the morning and in the evening. I’ll even go to the market for you next time!” I cradled the teapot closer to my chest, giving her the biggest smile I could. “I’ll take care of him. You’ll forget he’s even here.”
“All right,” my mother relented, and decided she could teach me the lesson another day. She looked at her daughter’s round cheeks, her unguarded smile, and wondered how something so soft could have come from her own silk, the heartless thing raising the fragile thing; she didn’t even expect me to return from the market without giving an extra few coins to the peddlers.
When I brought her Mask-Face, and Ikka, and the spirits fleeing the metal the Radiant Kingdom was pouring into our rivers, she relented those times too, populating the springs with strays, a monument of her daughter’s human fallibility.
The Governor’s prison filled my mouth with the taste of burnt metal. I coughed into my sleeve. The prison was in the middle of the city, so the prisoners could be put to work more easily in the pleasure houses or the factories that choked up black smoke, and it didn’t help that every guard had silver radicals scrawled across every inch of visible skin.
The bathhouse’s visitor had managed to find where the prisoner was being kept, near one of the cells for exceptional criminals. I had not asked about the relation between the two, for such devotion. It wasn’t my place, and it didn’t matter anyway. There was a woman who needed my help.
I moved through the grey stone corridors like a ghost, like the scorpion and spider demons in the old stories. I knew where to be and where not to be, and there weren’t many guards anyway. I supposed they didn’t need more, not when silver glittered from doorframes; there had never been a successful escape in the prison’s history.
I paused when I heard voices—from one of the cells down the corridor. Not the cell I was searching for, but I paused anyway, as if obliged to bear witness.
A man’s voice said, “You’ve had three daughters. No sons.”
“The Governor has many daughters as well. His captain, too,” a female voice answered.
I knew that voice. She had come to the bathhouse many times. She brought jars of home fermented burdock in thanks.
“The Governor’s allegiance isn’t in question, is it?” the man’s voice snarled.
I flinched at the woman’s screams, silver light pouring from the cell. I wanted to curl into myself with my hands over my ears; I wanted to sink my fingers into the interrogator, this man who had come to our land and turned the ordinary into the perverse, these men who took pieces of me I didn’t know I could still lose.
But I was no match for a Radiant, and there was a woman who needed my help, so I walked on, gripping the sack so tightly my knuckles whitened.
When the Radiant Kingdom waged their wars of conquest against us, my mother was glad she hadn’t forced misery down my throat like medicine earlier. Somewhere in those years was the last time I thought of myself as a girl.
So many women and men came to the spring of abortion in those years. It depleted the spring’s waters.
Seeing the lowering water level, I filled a bucket with rainwater and brought it to my mother, thinking that with a few more collections, I could replenish the springs. But she shook her head. She looked at me with such sadness even as she smiled.
“The springs are fed by the Mother-Child River,” she said, and told me the stories that the previous sentinels had told her, about the goddess who had cut her palm open for her daughter to drink from the torn skin. Even the purest lake could not replenish the blood-river of a goddess.
“Mother-Child River,” I said, slipping my hand into hers. “Like you and me.”
She looked surprised. It never stopped being a revelation, with the ease of my affection. She understood darkness and webs; the myths of mother and daughters and their rivers, the language of willing entanglements, were still something she felt more than something she could explain.
But she nodded. “Yes, like us.”
I managed a smile too, then slipped off to find Crane, who let me cry into his feathers and promised he would never let the Radiant Kingdom touch me.
I finally reached the cell, and the first thought that ripped through my mind was: this cannot be the woman I have been sent to save. But the swell of her stomach was evident, when I looked for it. I supposed I’d been distracted by the silver inlays stretching across her skin.
Of course I remember the woman my mother turned away from the spring of abortion. Her name was Serolind, and silver marked her hands in concentric circles. She begged my mother for access to the spring. The pregnancy had been forced upon her. She might die if she didn’t bathe in those waters.
My mother told her no. Because the waters were already depleted, because they needed to be saved for the Kingdom of Women, because it was the fault of Serolind’s people, because she didn’t deserve to pay the sins for her soldiers but neither did our women. In the cold equations of these things, innocents suffered. We still made those calculations.
Serolind refused to leave. I hid with the spirits when my mother extracted her, so I don’t know what she did, and she cleaned her hands before she found me again so I couldn’t guess, and I didn’t want to.
She didn’t regret it; she was a demon, after all, and she had killed without remorse a thousand times. But she regretted the way I looked at her, the daughter who had been so sweet and so soft, now calling herself a woman so early in life.
“You don’t have to stand sentinel over these waters,” my mother told me. She was braiding my hair. She hadn’t understood why I hated the Radiant loops when I was younger, why I hated changing my shape to blend in when she never minded shifting from spider to woman, but now she insisted on the ritual, even when I was old and jaded enough to braid them myself.
“But this is important to me.”
“If you stay,” my mother said, “you will have to make the judgements of who is deserving of the waters and who is not, and you will be wrong, whatever you judge. It will make you hard.”
“I’ll become who I need to,” I said, and meant it. Where in this conquered kingdom could I go that I would not have to make such judgements?
It took my mother three tries to tie off the braid, the hands that had ripped open aspiring heroes suddenly unsteady against her daughter’s dark hair.
For a moment, the woman of the Radiant Empire and I only looked at each other. She had been treated well in her imprisonment; the other prisoners’ flesh clung to their bones, but she had a healthy frame, her teeth neat and pale. Perhaps she was carrying the child of someone important. Perhaps she had called upon those metal inlays to kill a hundred of my countrywomen. Perhaps they had put her here for no reason at all, and she became afflicted from her work in the pleasure houses.
Then she cast her gaze down. “Please,” she said. “I know your people resent mine. I know you think we’ve done you a great wrong. But I don’t want to have this baby.” The cuffs that bound her were engraved with silver radicals as well: cage, suppression, dampening.
I crossed the space between us, and knelt beside her. A tiny square of window, barely enough to fit a fist through, provided the only light. Invisible grit dug into my knees.
She watched me loosen the drawstrings on the sack. “Do I need to drink it?”
“No,” I murmured, swallowing the disgust rising up my throat like bile. “You must be submerged, for the waters to take effect.”
“There’s nowhere to do it,” she said.
I stripped my shirt from beneath my jacket, balling it up and dipping it into the water. “I’ll wash you, if you’re amenable.”
“The guards. They’ll come soon.”
“They won’t.” I knew without looking that Crane was no longer behind me.
Her eyes fluttered closed, as if she couldn’t stand to watch herself at the mercy of one of her inferiors. “Why are you doing this?”
My mother wouldn’t have. But then—she wouldn’t have loved a human girl, or nestled an abandoned crane to her warmth either.
I wrung my shirt, making sure none of the residual water dripped onto the floor. “Can I touch you?”
She nodded.
I began at her hands, sponging my shirt against the webs of her fingers, wondering if they had ever been damp with spilt blood instead of divine water. Her pulse thrashed at her wrist.
Fighting not to shudder, I lathed the waters over her metal inlays, the weapons of an empire that had taken every woman I had ever loved from me. The inlays shone, cleansed of grime. They were warm, when I ran my fingers over them—warmed by the flesh and blood that ensconced them. Like this, I could almost believe them jewelry.
I heard my mother as I worked, voice ringing as it had when I was learning to tend to the quiet waters—for all that she would have disapproved of my weakness, she would have still made sure I saw it through. Don’t miss the skin behind the knee and the neck needs more water than you think and a bit harder, Aijira darling. We breathed in time.
When only a last layer of water remained in the sack, I slipped my shirt beneath her cheap prison clothes, navigating the swelling of pregnancy, the body betraying itself. I washed her stomach last. A sense of calm settled in my marrow, as familiar as a pair of hands braiding my hair, and I knew the task had been done.
Perhaps those women who met by midnight in the basement of the printer and spoke of revolution would call me a coward and traitor. I didn’t know that I wasn’t.
All the woman said when I rose was, “Thank you.”
I folded the sack, now light as a summer wind, over my arm and left. I didn’t trust myself to speak.
When I found Crane again, his beak was smeared in red, yellow eyes satisfied. The last thing those guards would’ve heard was a sound like a debtor jangling his coins, before their lungs and kidneys were punctured from the back.
“Let’s go home,” I said.
The spirits were happy to see me arrive back safely, but they also recognized that I was tired, and left me alone after their welcome. I smiled to see the river spirits riding upon Mask-Face’s shoulders, then took the candles and matches from beneath the counter, and made my way down the right hallway. The lull of the bathhall of birth greeted me. I didn’t submerge in the waters.
Nestled deep within the bathhouse, if you enter the bathhall of birth and keep walking into the dark, is a shrine with a few keepsakes atop it—a split-open silk sac, a teapot without a lid, a ribbon for tying hair. I knelt and lit the candles.
All those years ago, when my mother heard her daughter vow to become who she needed to keep the springs alive, when she held the slender, supple, so-easily-unraveled braid in her hand, she wanted to make a second sac, and stow her daughter away from all the tempests of the world. Her daughter who carried cranes in teapots, who refused to look away from the war even as her lip trembled, who she had carried across so many kingdoms and seas. Her daughter, who looked at a demon’s bloody hands as if they might string the moon.
She thought: I would give anything for you never to make those calculations that will break your heart.
And so my mother the heartless, my mother the monstress, broke her resolve never to weave another web again. She thought again of the story of the goddess and her cut hand and realized it had been nestled somewhere inside her before she ever heard it told; she wove an enchanted bathhouse that stood slantwise across space and time, whose waters could never be depleted, for they held the life of an immortal within them, and they would always. It stands now, still.
Bowing my head, I laid the candles upon my mother’s shrine.
Content Warnings: violence, abortion, death, pregnancy/childbirth, blood, bigotry