Wild Girls

II

Chergo's Daughter and Dead Ayu's First Daughter, who were now Vui and Modh, whispered in the grey of the morning before the men woke.

“Do you think she's dead?” Vui whispered.

“I heard her crying. All night."

They both lay listening.

“That one named her,” Vui whispered very low. “She can follow us."

“She will."

The little sister, Mal, was awake, listening. Modh put her arm around her and whispered, “Go back to sleep."

Near them, Bedh suddenly sat up, scratching his head. The girls stared wide-eyed at him.

“Well, Daughters of Tullu,” he said in their language spoken the way the Allulu spoke it, “you're Dirt people now."

They stared and said nothing.

“You're going to live in heaven on earth,” he said. “A lot of food. Big, rich huts to live in. And you don't have to carry your house around on your back across the world! You'll see. Are you virgins?"

After a while they nodded.

“Stay that way if you can,” he said. “Then you can marry gods. Big, rich husbands! These men are gods. But they can only marry Dirt women. So look after your little cherrystones, keep them from Dirt boys and men like me, and then you can be a god's wife and live in a golden hut.” He grinned at their staring faces and stood up to piss on the cold ashes of the fire.

While the Crown men were rousing, Bedh took the older girls into the forest to gather berries from a tangle of bushes nearby; he let them eat some, but made them put most of what they picked into his cap. He brought the cap full of berries back to the soldiers and offered them, his knuckles to his forehead. “See,” he said to the girls, “this is how you must do. Crown people are like babies and you must be their mothers."

Modh's little sister Mal and the younger children were silently weeping with hunger. Modh and Vui took them to the stream to drink. “Drink all you can, Mal,” Modh told her sister. “Fill up your belly. It helps.” Then she said to Vui, “Man-babies!” and spat. “Men who take food from children!"

“Do as the Allulu says,” said Vui.

It was some comfort to have a man who spoke their language with them. The soldiers now ignored them, leaving Bedh to look after them. He was kind enough, carrying the little ones, sometimes two at a time, for he was strong. He told Vui and Modh stories about the place where they were going. Vui began to call him Uncle. Modh would not let him carry Mal, and did not call him anything.

Modh was eleven. When she was six, her mother had died in childbirth, and she had always looked after the little sister.

When she saw the golden man pick up her sister and run down the hill, she ran after them with nothing in her mind but that she must not lose the little one. The men went so fast at first that she could not keep up, but she did not lose their trace, and kept after them all that day. She had seen her grandmothers and grandfathers slaughtered like pigs. She thought everybody she knew in the world was dead. Her sister was alive and she was alive. That was enough. That filled her heart.

When she held her little sister in her arms again, that was more than enough.

But then, in the hills, the cruel one threw away Sio's Daughter, and the golden one kept her from going to pick her up. She tried to look back at the place in the bushes where the baby lay, she tried to see the trees there so she could remember the place, but the golden man hit her so she was dizzy and drove and dragged her up the hill so fast her breath burned in her chest and her eyes clouded with pain. Sio's Daughter was lost. She would die there in the bushes. Foxes and wild dogs would eat her flesh and break her bones. A terrible emptiness came into Modh, a hollow, a hole of fear and anger that everything else fell into. She would never be able to go back and find the baby and bury her. Children before they are named have no ghosts, even if they are unburied, but the cruel one had named Sio's Daughter. He had pointed and named her: Groda. Groda would follow them. Modh had heard the thin cry in the night. It came from the hollow place. What could fill that hollow? What could be enough?