Dragonfly Song Read Online Free PDF Page B

hides, the guard who broke his leg on a mountain trail and died painfully as it rotted. I could cry for the tanner’s daughter , Aissa thinks. She was too young to know that I was cursed .
    It doesn’t work: her tears are as blocked as her throat.
    But now seven days and seven nights have passed, and the moon is full. Tonight is Firefly Night, when the dead souls fly free, ready to be reborn. Today is a time of cleansing and new clothes, to make everything fresh for the rebirth. Servants are given their freshly washed, handed-down tunics for the next year. Aissa’s is neatly folded in a corner of the kitchen; she’s not going to put it on till she’s finished her chores, but her mind keeps going back to it: clean and almost white, with all the tears mended.
    The sun is sinking low into the western sea. The square is starting to hum with excitement: farmers and fishers are arriving, hunters are swaggering in their finest skins and townfolk are parading their finery.
    Aissa is scrubbing the servants’ privy.
    She’d filled two buckets at the well before this morning’s dawn ceremony, and she hasn’t stopped sweeping, scrubbing and hauling soil and water ever since. Even this privy, which is really just a shelter around a hole behind the vegetable garden, needs to be spotless by sunset.
    It stinks. All the privies stink.
    So does Aissa – which is why she’ll never see the celebration.
    There’s a roar from the square. The Lady and her family have appeared.
    The first year
    Aissa still new
    cursed but clean,
    Kelya holding tight
    when the chief called the names
    for Dada, Gaggie and Poppa.
    Kelya howling
    waggling her tongue,
    ‘Like this! Like this.’
    Aissa’s tongue waggling
    – like this, like this –
    with no howl coming;
    her throat staying quiet
    still as stone.
    And the same today,
    eight years older
    still as silent:
    her tongue can wag
    but her throat won’t wail.
    ‘Honour your dead!’
    calls the Lady to the crowd
    and they lululu back,
    fishers and farmers,
    hunters and town,
    a thousand tongues trilling,
    a thousand throats howling
    the lululu of grief
    that Aissa keeps in her heart.
    Then the Lady and the chief,
    Fila and three small brothers
    start out the gate
    and the crowd parts
    like a river for a rock
    to stream up the mountain.
    ‘Honour Melos the guard!’ calls the chief
    and guards and potters,
    bakers and tailors,
    toddlers on shoulders,
    gaggies with sticks
    and lowly servants
    wail for Melos.
    The names will be called
    all the way up the mountain
    and all as one
    the island will wail
    for each of the dead.
    Only Aissa is too impure
    to follow the crowd.
    Only Aissa won’t see
    the fireflies of rebirth.
    This time I’m not going to miss it!
    It won’t take long to finish here. If she rushes into the servants’ washhouse the instant everyone else is done, she can scrub herself clean enough for that fresh new tunic—
    ‘Did you check the privy hole before you threw new earth in?’
    Aissa jumps. Standing behind her, laughing, are the sharp-tongued kitchen twins, Half-One and Half-Two.
    It’s never good when the twins are laughing.
    ‘Your new tunic didn’t stink the way you like it.’
    ‘So we threw it down the hole this morning. You can get it out now.’ Giggling gleefully, they run hand in hand to the washhouse.
    The world blackens. For an instant Aissa can’t see or hear. Then the blackness turns red and rage fills her, even deeper and stronger than the despair.
    Before she can think twice, she hurls her filthy rag down the hole and marches back out into the sunlight. She knows exactly what she smells like. But for once, it’s not going to stop her.
    As the last of the Hall folk turn onto the road, the crowd surges behind them. They’ve come from every house in the town and every outlying farm. Old men and women walk with sticks; babies and children ride on their parents’ backs. The servants, once they’re finally clean, will trail at the end of the long, long