The Mistress of Spices Read Online Free PDF Page A

tongue tastes like copper, like a nightmare you escape for a moment, struggling, because if you sleep you will fall into it again, but your eyes are too heavy and force themselves closed.
    Maybe I am mistaken this time too. Why can I not believe it?
    Kalo jire
, I think, just before the vision comes upon me again, blood and shattered bone and a thin cry like a red thread strangling the night. I must get
kalo jire
, spice of the dark planet Ketu, protector against the evil eye. Spice that is blueblack and glistening like the forest Sundarban where it was first found.
Kalo jire
shaped like a teardrop, smelling raw and wild like tigers, to cover over what fate has written for Haroun.

     
    You may have guessed this already. It is the hands that call power out of the spices.
Hater gun
, they call it.
    Therefore the first thing the Old One examines when the girls come to the island are the hands.
    This is what she says.
    “A good hand is not too light, nor too heavy. Light hands are the wind’s creatures, flung this way and that at its whim. Heavy hands, pulled downward by their own weight, have no spirit. They are only slabs of meat for the maggots waiting underground.
    “A good hand is not palm-splotched with brown, the mark of a wicked temper. When you cup it tight and hold it up against the sun, between the fingers are no gaps for spells and spices to slip through.
    “Not cold and dry as the snake’s belly, for a Mistress of spices must feel the other’s pain.
    “Not warm and damp as the breath of a waiting lover against the windowpane, for a Mistress must leave her own passions behind.
    “In the center of the good hand is imprinted an invisible lily, flower of cool virtue, glowing pearl at midnight.” Do your hands fit this litany? Nor did mine. How then, you ask, did I become a Mistress. Wait, I will tell you.
    From the moment the oldest serpent told me the way, I drove my pirates day and night, relentless, till they dropped on the deck exhausted, not daring to ask why or where. Then one evening we saw it on the horizon, a smudge like smoke or seacloud. But I knew what it was. Anchor, I ordered, and would not say more. And while the tired crew slept as though tranced, I dived into the midnight ocean.
    The island was far, but I was confident. I sang a chant for weightlessness, and pushed through the waves easy as air. But while the island was still small as a fist pushing up into the sky, the chant died in my throat. My arms and legs grew heavy and would not obey. In these waters charmed by a greater sorceress, my power was nothing. I struggled and thrashed andswallowed brine like any other clumsy mortal until at last I dragged myself onto the sand and collapsed into a dizzy whorl of dreams.
    The dreams I do not remember, but the voice that woke me from them I will never forget. Cool and grainy with a hint of a mocking laugh in it, yet deep, deep, a voice to plunge your heart into.
    “What has the god of the sea belched up on our shore this morning?”
    The Old One, surrounded by her novices, and the sun a halo behind her head and shimmering many-colored in her lashes. So that I scrambling to my knees felt impelled to lower my own sand-caked ones.
    It was then I saw that I was naked. The sea had stripped me of all, clothes and magic and for the moment arrogance even. Had thrown me at her feet bereft of all but this dark, ugly body.
    In shame I pulled at my salt-stiff hair to cover me. In shame I crossed my arms over my chest and bent my head.
    But already she was removing her shawl, placing it around my shoulders. Soft and gray as a dove’s throat, and the spice-smell rising from it like a mystery I longed to learn. And her hands. Soft, but with the skin burned pink-white and puckered to the elbows as though she had plunged them into a long-ago blaze.
    “Who are you, child?”
    Who was I? I could not say. Already my name had faded in the rising island sun, like a star from a night that has passed away. Only much