The Rock Child by Win Blevins Read Free Book Online Page A

enough to peer through them, and naturally saw nothing but a face covered with fingers. She watched the candlelight flicker on her fingers and her black hair. Slowly, one by one, she lifted the fingers up, and still saw nothing. Abruptly, like pulling away from a hot stove, she jerked her hands away.
    My face is gouged . From her forehead above the left eye, through the eyebrow, through both eyelids, onto the cheek ran the ugly ditch. It was still partly scabbed. The stitches had stretched the skin near the wound tight, and the wound itself was a pucker.
    She sank to her knees and burst into tears. She flung her face down into her hands. Then, facedown, away from the mirror, ashamed, she snuffed out the candles one by one. She never knew how long she kneltthere in the darkness, weeping. Finally the iron band gripped her throat and cut off the tears.
    Other nights, alone or not, she laid plans. She knew that Tarim had poured laudanum into her tea that first day. Now she ate or drank nothing she didn’t prepare herself. She determined to become useful as a cook, a maid, and a clerk in the store. Maybe I can become so helpful Tarim will give up on making me a whore . But she didn’t think so. The virgin nun with the awful scar . It might have even more appeal.
    By day she paid attention to the common talk, trying to figure out the way back to Gam Saan, San Francisco. Hard Rock City was a new mining town, miles off the old wagon road, the Oregon Trail, the way Jehu brought her. That was a hard way to San Francisco, northwest to Oregon and then south by ship. To the southwest, the direct way called the California Trail, stretched terrible deserts. But she heard about a roundabout route, a wagon road southeast to a big city called Salt Lake. There you could get a stagecoach. Better than a ship to Gam Saan, she thought. Cheaper. And safer—you can get off a stagecoach .
    She could always hope, too, that the pursuers would look in the wrong direction, assume she had gone the way she came, toward Oregon. But if they looked in the right direction, that was fine. I have within me Mahakala, eater of men .
    She stole a copy of the map of Idaho Territory Tarim sold to customers, and another of what was called the Far West, kept them under her thin mattress of ticking, and studied them by candle at night, when Tarim was asleep. As she learned to read the words, Snake River, Great Salt Lake, Idaho Territory, Oregon Territory, Utah Territory, Nevada Territory, she pieced together a picture of her journey. Southeast from Hard Rock City, in what they called Idaho Territory. Walk several hundred miles by foot to Salt Lake City. Travel west by coach across vast deserts and then across mountains to the big bay at San Francisco. Then a ship … How will I get a coach? How will I get a ship? She refused to consider. As long as she lives, a warrior fights .
    One day the doctor brought the promised cedar. The barley flour was long since ground. She mixed the flour with butter to make tsampa, wishing she had old yak butter. She shaped the dough into cones. She burned the cedar, and placed the deity’s food before the box. First she prostrated herself in front of the altar three times, then sat in the lotusposition. She chanted the long-known words, words she had memorized over years, familiar as furnishings in a beloved room. No longer were they comforting—they made her mind bristle with the sense of danger.
    When she had finished, properly, she threw the torma to the dog.
    She set the altar box at the foot of her cot. Would Tarim recognize an altar? Would he care? To the ignorant eye it was nothing.
    Sun Moon knelt before the altar. She did a full prostration, then another, then another, and many more. She sought to find the warrior spirit within her, and to accept it.
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    Tarim lifted the flap and stood in her doorway. She was eating the tsampa she had made as a relief from the endless rice. “Come,” he said, “I want you to meet the new