The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,83

scrape of the shaving blade against my skull. Mucii. Home.” Jane shrugged. “I was eight when the drought came, and the railroad. Our mother took us to the mission school and said she would return with the rain in April. I never saw her again. I like to think she died of some fever in the work camps, because then it is possible to forgive her.” Her voice oozed with the bitterness of abandonment, of waiting and waiting for a parent who never returned; I shivered in recognition.

“My sister forgot her entirely. She was too young. She forgot our language, our land, our names. The teachers called her Baby Charlotte, and she introduced herself as Baby.” Another shrug. “She was happy.” Jane paused, the muscles of her jaw hard as marbles, and I heard the unsaid I was not.

“So you ran. Where did you go?”

Her jaws unclenched. “Away. I had no place to go. I returned to the mission twice on my own, because I got sick or hungry or tired, and once tied behind an officer’s horse because I’d been caught stealing buns from the barracks. The fourth time I was older, nearly fourteen. I made it much farther.” I saw myself briefly at fourteen—uncertain, lonely, wearing pressed linen skirts and practicing my penmanship—and found I could not imagine running alone through the African bush at that age. Or any age. “I made it all the way home, except it wasn’t home anymore. There was just a big ugly house with shingles and chimneys, and little blond children playing out front. A black woman in a white apron was watching them.” She shrugged again; I began to see them as practical gestures, designed to shed the weight of resentment threatening to settle on her shoulders. “So I kept running. South, where the highlands fold up into valleys and mountains. Where the trees are dry and wind-burnt and food is scarce. I grew thin. The cattle herders watched me pass and said nothing.”

I made a sound, a sort of disbelieving tsk, and Jane spared me a pitying look. “The empire had arrived by then, with its borderlines and deeds and railroads and Maxim guns. I was not the only motherless, feral child running through the bush.”

I was silent. I thought of Mr. Locke’s lectures on Progress and Prosperity. There were never any orphan girls or stolen farms or Maxim guns in them. Bad, lying beneath my chair with his splinted leg sticking stiffly out from his body, shifted so that his head was more completely covering my foot.

Jane continued. “I found the ivory door and went through. I thought at first I had died and passed into the world of spirits and gods.” Her lips parted in an almost-smile, and her eyes crimped with some new emotion—longing? Homesickness? “I was in a forest so green it was almost blue. The door I’d come through was behind me, set among the exposed roots of a vast tree. I wandered away from it, deeper into the woods.

“I know now how foolish that was. The forests in that world are full of cruel, creeping things, many-mouthed monsters with a bottomless hunger. It was mere luck—or God’s will, as the mission workers would have it—that I found Liik and her Hunters before anything else found me. It didn’t feel all that lucky at the time: I stepped around a tree trunk and found an arrowhead inches from my face.”

I covered my gasp with a cough, hoping to sound less like a small child listening to a campfire story. “What did you do?”

“Not a damn thing. Surviving is often a matter of knowing when you’re beat. I heard rustling behind me and knew others were emerging, that I was surrounded. The woman holding the bow was hissing at me in a language I didn’t know. Apparently I didn’t look like much of a threat—a hungry girl-child, wearing a white cotton shift with the collar torn off—because Liik lowered her weapon. Only then could I get a proper look at them all.”

The hard lines of Jane’s face softened, just a little, warmed by fond reminiscence. “They were women. Muscled, golden-eyed, impossibly tall, with a kind of rolling grace that made me think of lionesses. Their skin was mottled and spotted and their teeth when they smiled were sharp. I thought they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

“They took me in. We couldn’t understand one another but their instructions were simple ones: follow, eat, stay,