elaborately carved, gilded and lacquered cabinet before me had once seemed a gleaming casket of mystery. ‘It’s just furniture,’ I said aloud. ‘A chest of drawers full of incense blocks. Mother, nothing in here is going to save me. I don’t know what will. If I did, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it. I’d even be willing to offer blood sacrifice to the old gods if I thought it would work. Cecile Poronte’s family does.’ It was the first time I’d mentioned that to anyone. In the days since the wedding, I’d felt no inclination to share any conversation at all with my father.
My mother paled at my words. Then she carefully corrected me. ‘Cecile is a Burvelle now, Nevare. Cecile Burvelle.’ She stepped past me and opened the sage drawer of the cabinet. Sage for wisdom. She took out a fist-sized greenish brick of incense and carried it to the worship brazier. With gilded tongs, she held it to the slumbering coals, stooping to blow through pursed lips to wake their ashed red to glowing scarlet. A slender tendril of smoke rose to scent the room and one corner of the sage brick caught the charcoal’s red kiss. She did not look at me as she bore the sage incense to the alcove for health and tucked it safely inside.
She stood for a moment in silent prayer. Habit urged me to join her there and I suddenly wished I could. But my soul felt dry and bereft of faith. No words of praise or entreaty welled in me, only hopelessness. When my mother turned aside from the mural, I said, ‘You knew the Porontes worship the old gods, didn’t you? Does father know?’
She shook her head impatiently. I don’t know if she was answering my question or dismissing it. ‘Cecile is a Burvelle now,’ she insisted. ‘It no longer matters what she did in the past. She will worship the good god alongside us every Sixday, and her children will be raised to do the same.’
‘Did you see the dead birds?’ I asked her abruptly. ‘Did you see that ghastly little carousel in their garden?’
She pursed her lips as she came to take a seat on the bench. She patted a space beside her and I sat down reluctantly. She spoke softly. ‘They invited me to witness it. Cecile’s mother sent an invitation to your sisters and me. The words were cloaked but I understood what it was about. We arrived too late. Deliberately.’ She paused for a moment and then advised me sincerely, ‘Nevare, let this go. I don’t think that they truly worship the old gods. It is more a tradition, a form to be observed rather than any true belief. The women of their family have always made such offerings. Cecile made the Bride’s Gift to Orandula, the old god of balances. The slain birds are a gift to the carrion bird incarnation of Orandula. His own creatures are killed and then offered back to him to feed his own. It’s a balance. The hope is that the woman offering the sacrifice will not lose any children to stillbirth or cradle death.’
‘Does trading dead birds for live children make any sense to you?’ I demanded. And then, rudely I added, ‘Do you really find any sense in burning a block of leaves to make the good god give us what we ask?’
She looked at me strangely. ‘That’s an odd question to be troubling a soldier son, Nevare. But perhaps it is because you were born to be a soldier that you ask it. You are applying the logic of man to a god. The good god is not bound by our human logic or measurements, son. On the contrary, we are bound by his. We are not gods, to know what pleases a god. We were given the Holy Writ, so that we might worship the good god as will please him, rather than offering him things that might please a man. I, for one, am very grateful. Imagine a god who dealt as men do: what would he demand of a bride in exchange for future children? What might such a god ask of you as recompense to restore your lost beauty? Would you want to pay it?’
She was trying to make me think, but her last words stung me. ‘Beauty? Lost beauty? This is not a matter of vanity, Mother! I am trapped in this bulky body and nothing I do seems to change it. I cannot put on my boots or get out of bed without being bound by it. How can you assume you can even imagine what it is like for me to be a prisoner in my own flesh.’
She looked at me silently for a few moments. Then a small smile passed her lips. ‘You were too small to remember my pregnancies with Yaril and Vanze. Perhaps you cannot even remember what I looked like before my last two children were born.’ She lifted her arms as if inviting me to consider it. I glanced at her and away. Time and childbearing had thickened her body, but she was my mother. She was supposed to look that way. I could, vaguely, recall a younger, slender mother who had chased me laughing through the freshly planted garden in our early years at Widevale. And I did recall her last pregnancy with Vanze. I most recalled how she had lumbered through the rooms of the house on her painfully swollen feet.
‘But that’s not the same thing at all,’ I retorted. ‘The changes then and now, those are natural changes. What has befallen me is completely unnatural. I feel as if I am trapped in some Dark Evening costume that I cannot shed. You are so caught up in looking at my body that all of you, Father, Yaril and even you, cannot perceive that within I am still Nevare! The only thing that has changed is my body. But I am treated as if I am these walls of fat rather than the person trapped behind them.’
My mother allowed a small silence to settle between us before she observed, ‘You seem very angry at us, Nevare.’
‘Well, of course I am! Who would not be, in these circumstances?’
Again she made that quiet space before suggesting in a reasonable voice, ‘Perhaps you should direct that anger against your real enemy, to add greater strength to your will to change yourself.’
‘My will?’ My anger surged again. ‘Mother, it has nothing to do with my will. My discipline has not failed. I work from dawn to dusk. I eat less than I did as a child. And still, I continue to grow heavier. Did not Father speak to you about Dr Amicas’s letter? The doctor thinks that this unnatural weight gain is a result of the plague. If it is, what can I do about it? If I had survived a pox, no one would fault me for a scarred face. If the Speck plague had left me trembling and thin, people would offer me sympathy. This is exactly the same, yet I am despised for it.’ It was horribly depressing to know that not even my mother understood what I was going through. I had hoped that my father would have explained my fat as a medical condition to my family and to Carsina’s parents. But he had told no one. No wonder Yaril had no sympathy for me. If my mother, my oldest and staunchest ally, deserted me, I would be completely alone in facing my fate.
She pulled out the last block of support, speaking to me as if I were seven and caught in an obvious falsehood.
‘Nevare. I watched you eat at Rosse’s wedding. How can you say that you eat less than you did as a child? You devoured enough food to sustain a man for a week.’
‘But—’ I felt as if she had knocked the breath from my lungs. Her calm eyes so gently pierced me as she met my gaze.
‘I don’t know what happened to you at the Academy, my son. But you cannot hide from it behind a wall of fat. I know nothing of the doctor’s letter to your father. But I do know that what I have seen of how you eat now would cause this change in any man.’
‘You can’t believe I eat like that at every meal!’
She kept her calm. ‘Do not shout at me, Nevare. I am still your mother. And why else would you hide from your family at every meal if not because your gluttony shamed you? As it should. That shame is a positive sign. But instead of concealing your weakness, you must control it, my dear.’
I rose abruptly. I towered over her and for the first time in my life, I saw alarm cross my mother’s face as she looked up at me. She knew that I could have crushed her.
I spoke carefully, biting off each word. ‘I am not a glutton, Mother. I did nothing to deserve this fate. It’s a medical condition.
