Anya Lehnsherr | Earth 97400 (
fridgetothefire) wrote2011-03-05 04:06 am
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Entry tags:
What If? Anya lived through everything that should have killed her, but no one knew.
Everything hurts.
Her skin is too hot, raw, stinging, like the time she tried to touch the bright coals in the hearth while Mama was busy with the washing, only so much more. She coughs, and that’s far worse, dry, angry insects searing inside her. The dust is very soft and she slumps back against the ground, the puff of light earth only making her cough more. Her eyes sting and her skin crackles and she wants to cry, but she doesn’t. She breathes through her nose, carefully, until she loses count of her breaths. It doesn’t take that long – she remembers her letters better than numbers.
By then everything hurts just a tiny bit less.
She pushes onto her hands and knees, and fights not to scream because then the insects will tear her throat and chest again. She breathes shallowly instead, soft whistles through her dry mouth. She does not try to stand.
She throbs all over, her back and arms and face and legs and hands, and she crawls slowly toward the river. What she thought was dust is, in many places, ash, grey-white and softer than snow.
No one sees her, no one cries out. The realization comes to her slowly, filtered through the pain. No dogs bark or chickens cluck or clunky cars rumble past. Everything is all burned up, except for her. She reaches the river where it bends, a little slower-moving pool where Mama always yells at her not to play, her mermaid-cove/pirate-harbor/shark-infested-bay. She would catch salamanders and gnash her teeth on their tranquil behalf, chase Poppa along the mottled sand and clay stripes of the shore. Poppa was very scared of sharks, so she would always save him and throw them back in the end.
Now she just slides into the water. It’s cold, so cold, soaking the scraps of her dress, but it makes the pain go almost all away, except the burrowing ache that hides deep in her bones, where the water can’t reach. She drinks a little of it, shivering half from the temperature and half in relief as the soothing liquid slides down her parched, scorched throat, finding a place to hold on that leaves most of her body under the surface. She stays like that, stiff fingers locked into the roots of reeds, her head resting against smooth grey stone. Everything goes cold and numb and she sleeps, but she does not let go.
She doesn’t know how long she stays like that, sleeping and sipping the water and letting the cold leach the fierceness from her burns.
Her eyes blink open in bright sunlight, the next day, or the day after. The river ripples white and silver, and she feels very tired, soft and weightless, not cold at all. Black at the edges, like the remnants of the town she crawled through before. She knows she could stop here. She thinks of it that way in her bright young mind, not death but stopping. She could rest and not get up again. It’s a nice thought, but it makes her mouth twist, faintly sour, like a cup of sweet milk gone just a little bad in the summer. She manages to unlock her fingers, crawls slowly back onto the shore. She collapses on the sun-warmed sand, and sleeps again.
*
She wakes up ravenous.
She drags herself back through town, and it hits her this time, that everything is wrecked, that no one is left. Blasted-open buildings lean on blackened timbers. She pokes into rooms that once were kitchens and root cellars, but cans are twisted heaps of melted slag, bread and vegetables are ash, and half-scoured bones lie posed like neighbors she knew.
She goes back to the river. There are sounds there beyond her own uneven footsteps and rasping breath. The gurgle of the water, wind rustling the stubborn sticks of ravaged trees, the soft plops of creatures that survived hidden in the mud.
There are frogs on the river this time of year, not as good as salamanders for playing shark, but fatter and easier to catch, even sore and raw and aching. She squats in the mud and seizes one, smashing its head against a rock until it stops wriggling in her hand. The skin is disgusting, murky and slimy and bitter, but the meat tastes good, fresh and juicy with blood and light-tasting, halfway between the chickens Mama kept and the fish Poppa brought home every once in a while, for very special occasions.
She drops the bones and catches two more.
She washes the blood from her hands and mouth in the river, though she doesn’t bother with her stained and tattered dress, then follows the river, the same direction it flows. It’s easier walking that way, and there’s nothing to stay for.
*
The river takes her south, keeps her well enough in water and frogs. It’s a long time before she sees anyone else, and then she hides, a part of the muck and weeds. She walks for days and days, far more than she can count. It feels like she walks forever.
Someday, the river ends in salt and burly men with gravel accents and sharp gull-caws, the gleaming sides of shipping containers and concrete warehouses and barnacle-encrusted hulls towering over her. There is little place for an urchin in poor and regimented Soviet Mykolaiv, and the gulls beat her to any scraps worth having, so she hides in one of the boats, curling into a small knot of misery, her belly heaving out what feels like everything she ate since she left home. She cries for the first time, wishing Poppa would hold her tight, wishing Mama would stroke her hair and sing rich, lilting songs, wishing she could squeeze warm and crushed between them. Her tears are hot on her face, less salty and less rank than the seeping bilge sloshing around her, and she smears them over her cheeks and clutches herself into a tinier ball.
By the time they make port in Odessa, she can breathe again, the rocking of the waves the closest thing to comfort she has.
There are rats on the ship, lean vicious things made of teeth and whiptails and claws. They are much harder to kill than frogs, but when she breaks the neck of a lame one, the skin of her arms shredded, the meat is warm. She gets better, snapping the slender leg bones into sharp splinters she can wield, makeshift claws of her own.
Some of the sailors think they have a cat on board, and leave out a little runny cream for her; she drinks it all in a long, single gulp.
*
She hears snatches of Romanian and Bulgarian, but she doesn’t sneak off the ship until they reach Istanbul, the round, burbling warmth of a language she’s never heard, and no Russian at all.
It’s better than she’d hoped. Turkey is Muslim, and Muslims must give alms, and there is no charity without poverty. There are other children on the streets, dirtier and more angular than the monkeys, with dark eyes and swift movements, one cupped palm begging while the fingers of the other hand slip into purses and pockets. No one looks at her twice.
She watches the other children, which ones are dappled with bruises and which ones move with the quick reactions born of enough energy, not just fear. She follows the latter from the market back to their den, a loft over a tailor’s shop, crowded but far too nice to be a hovel, a sturdy roof with good prominences for climbing and fresh breeze off the Bosporus straights.
Their keeper laughs when she brings him back his own qibla after a day of believing it lost. She can’t speak Turkish yet, but it’s a more eloquent way of saying she can earn her keep. He strokes a thoughtful finger over the twisted pink ropes of her scars, calls her kül kedisi, and sets her to begging until she understands him well enough to take more specific instructions.
*
He makes her better clothes, warmer and sturdier than they look, carefully torn to reveal the worst of her scars and cover smooth skin. They make her burns look much worse, much more widespread than they are. She sits in an alley leading toward the market with a cracked bowl and moans like the marks are fresh, even though the shiny patches don’t even feel the pain of normal scrapes anymore. She has a shy-sweet smile for every jingle in the bowl, a soft hitching breath of gratitude and hopefulness even though her body is twisted and she obviously can’t breathe quite right – it brings a second clatter of coins more often than not.
She watches the people swishing back and forth, among the smells of frying fish and spices and unwashed bodies and apple tea, listening to the spiraling, haunting call of the muezzin from the mosque spires, the creak and bustle of the city, the chatter of gossip and haggling and the news of the day. By the end of the year, her Turkish is better than her childish Roma and Ukranian or her fading Russian.
*
Back at the den, the whole crew gathers together for stories, plots ripped off of Westerns and old fairy tales about genies and the much-embellished exploits of the older ones all tossed together.
Kül kedisi, she learns, is Cinderella.
*
They can sneak into the movies, once they’ve made enough for the day, gritty black-and-white pieces from Yesilçam or bright, incomprehensible things stuffed with color and songs from Hollywood. She can mostly understand spoken English (though she still struggles with the songs) by the time The Ten Commandments bursts across world screens.
The Nile is nothing like the Ingul, but the idea of it delights her anyway, a child from the river. She wants to stand on top of the seatbacks and let the projector slash her shadow across the screen. She digs her nails into her palms when the column of fire in the desert bellows, stuffs her knuckles into her mouth to stop herself screaming at the Egyptians. The fire will destroy everything. Why don’t they know? But they’re stupid, and they don’t listen. She touches her mouth when Moses tells them to smear blood on the doorways, remembering her father for the first time in months, the way he disliked the taste of the blood, and the smell of it cooking. He told her it wasn’t clean, but she thought it was delicious, even before the frogs.
This is who she is, she thinks as the movie plods on and on and on through the desert, and she has no idea why they didn’t just follow the flowing glut of blood and frogs their god offered them. But she feels for them still, because she is the blood-smeared one, the one who meets the fire, the one who survives at the price of leaving everything else behind.
*
She’s getting taller, gawky bones like sticks, strong from climbing like the goats that scramble between the rocky tiers of the city. It’s not a good thing. She isn’t quite as cute any longer, nowhere near as pitiful as she was off the boat, in that awkward time when the younger children make better beggars but the older girls make better whores.
Her scars are too distinctive for street theft, too easy to notice with or without a scarf to hide them, because even in Istanbul, a hidden face arouses distrust, and orthodox women have better clothes, do not wander so frequently or so freely in the worst sections of the bustling streets.
The tailor finally sends her house-stealing, scuttling over roofs and slipping through windows. She smears ashes on her face, a smudge of shadow on shadows. Kül Kedisi, the tailor-keeper says again, teeth like stars in the black of his beard when he chuckles.
Be back by dawn, Kül, he tells her, and she nods, promising to bring back dazzling jewelry, her own fairy godmother in reverse.
*
She is invisible and silent, as though the roofs and lintels she steps on were muffled with the same soft ash hiding her face. She is as light as the fluffy grey flakes of it that float on the wind, she is smoke and shadow as she slips inside and takes whatever she wants.
But a girl is more than ashes, and a girl may be unlucky. She is in the kitchen, winding fine silver into yards of silk to silence the clink and rattle of it, and a man catches her there when he wanders in for a glass of water, stunned and stupefied in his embroidered pajamas.
Then he lunges at her.
She spears his arm with a serving fork and kicks out, but he’s much larger, strong with weight behind it instead of her wiry desperation, and it only makes him roar and slam her against the counter. Granite, she thinks dimly, and ow, bright light scattering across the darkness of her view.
He grabs her arm, and he could easily break it, rip it from its socket like a boy tugging the legs off an insect. She scrabbles for something, anything, smashes a bottle against his face and feels slick cooking oil drip down as she yanks her arm free. He groans, lurches, snarls bitch, but she flicks on the stove – gas, clicking until it flares – and runs. The flame cackles with glee, racing up the splattered oil trail, consuming man and kitchen alike. She scrambles out the window, onto the roof, leaps to the next building with an agonizing jolt as heat and smoke start to billow out of it behind her.
She can’t move, her whole body aching, the shock of landing after being thrown onto the stone counters knocking her flat. Her mind sizzles, empty and furious with the raw thoughtless panic adrenaline. She struggles to draw breath, lungs that never quite healed and old gut-churning fear working in concert against her as she stares at the window, listens to the terrible, shrieking screams of the man she burned.
Slowly, her breathing evens out. She wiggles, winces, then manages to stand, to slowly walk away. She isn’t afraid anymore.
The tailor yells when he sees the state of her, no silver and his silk lost besides, but she shakes her head.
“That’s not my name,” is all she tells him. “I’m not Kül. I’m Kor.”
She is the one who survives the fire, who still burns. Not ashes, not cinders, but Ember.