Plain Kate

Drina took her mother’s elbow as if to guide her through blindness. “It’s not—” she whispered. But before she could explain to Lenore that this was not her husband but his twin, Behjet tottered to his feet. The knife fell and sank its point in the wet earth with a sound that made Kate wince. “Am I dead? Are you my burned ones, come to take me off to hell?”

“No one is dead,” said Drina, but Lenore said “I do not know if I am dead,” and Kate said, “Why did it have to be you?”

“What?” Behjet was bewildered and shivering inside a skin that hung from him as if he were indeed a walking corpse.

“Linay is dead,” Kate said. “And those people in front of the gate, and the ones in the square. And Stivo and Ciri, and my father, and—” She could not speak Taggle’s name. “My—my heart is dead.” She picked up his knife and stood looking at it, the darkness of the mud on the blade. “Of everyone who could have lived, why did it have to be you?”

And she pushed past him, up into the golden quiet of the vardo.

¶

Outside, Drina, Behjet, and Lenore murmured together like mourners standing about at a wake. Kate thought that they were telling one another pieces of their long, strange story. Then she thought of how the story ended, and she stopped caring.

She sat down on the bunk. It still smelled of Behjet’s long sickness. The blanket folds were stiff with sweat-grime. Taggle was dead. It should have wiped clean the world, yet here was washing to be done. Kate took a big breath, and put his body down.

His beautiful fur was matted with blood. He would hate that. She got out one of the horse brushes. She brushed until the bristles were thick as if with rust, and his fur was perfect. She liked the grain of it, how it followed the lines of his bones and muscles. It swirled in knots over his joints, and stood in a soft ridge along his breastbone, just beside the wound that had killed him. It was strange that his fur was still so soft, while his body was stiffening.

She sat beside him, numb, forever.

She had never been the sort for ghosts, though she had seen too much of them. But she would have cut off her carving hand to glimpse one now. It wasn’t fair. There should at least be a ghost.

But there was no ghost. Only Behjet, and Drina behind him, hovering at the curtain. She hadn’t seen them come in.

“Plain Kate,” the Roamer man said. His voice was soft as if he were gentling a horse. “I have prayed—Plain Kate—”

“Just Kate.”

“What?”

“Kate.” She was as plain as she had ever been. And over that she was burn scarred and half bald. But Taggle had thought she was beautiful. “My name is Katerina Svetlana. Kate.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

And no one said anything for a while. The canvas arch around them glowed with sun.

Then Behjet said, “Your cat. Drina has told me—”

“He was more than a cat,” she said.

Another silence. “What should we do with…” said Drina.

Taggle’s body was what she didn’t say. Kate had been thinking about that. She had been thinking about nothing else. “That place where we met: the meadow by the river. He was happy there. We had sausages.” She looked up. “We can bury—”

But she couldn’t finish.

“I’ll harness Cream,” said Drina.

¶

Inside the vardo, Kate took apart one of the trestle benches and put it together again as a box. She used Behjet’s shaving knife, though it sat like a stranger in her hand, though she knew she was ruining its edge and somewhere deep inside, her carver’s soul protested. Her knife—she had killed her friend with her knife. She had left her knife and maybe her heart there, lying in blood and fire.

But still she worked. Her hands as they cut the dovetails for the joints seemed strange to her: Darkness trailed them as they moved; their lower sides wore the darkness like a second skin. It was her shadow. Her shadow, returning.

She worked as Cream was harnessed, bits of tack rattling like muffled bells. She worked as Drina came and wrapped Taggle’s body in her favorite scarf, the red one with the white birds. She worked as the vardo rattled over the corduroy road. She worked as the branches scraped the canvas sides like fingernails. She worked as the light failed and the vardo shuddered to a stop.

She finished the box. It was strong and square, and would last a long time, even in the earth. And then she waited.

After too short a time the shovel stopped. But Kate couldn’t get up. She thought about Taggle’s name, and how the Roamers didn’t say the names of the dead. And she hadn’t said his, not yet. She was afraid to. It would make it real.

Lenore lifted the curtain and paused, a pale shape in white against the lavender evening. “If a woman,” she said softly, “might enter and speak.”

Kate shrugged.