‘Worse than taking in a stray cat’

Where was this mangy little kitten from, I wondered. Nowhere around here. Nowhere even close. Look at those eyes, as pale as weak tea.

I don’t usually take in strays but, for some reason, this time I said yes.

The miner (I couldn’t remember his name, but no point in letting him know that) turned down my offer of a treat on the house—that garnet was worth a pile more that what it would cost me to keep the girl. He said he had to get to his contract agent before the office closed for the night. True enough—a contractor would not look kindly on a miner who went off to sleep with a pocket full of garnets.

I said a friendly goodbye to the man—no matter what the business, you want to leave your clients feeling good when they walk out your door—and turned back towards my sitting room, hollering for anyone who wasn’t with a customer. Bina’s head peeked out.

“Put some clothes on,” I snapped, and sent her to Mr. Ghilly’s for some fever-powder and some medicine against infection.

“His shop’ll be shuttered at this hour,” she protested. “He’ll be in bed.”

“Well, wake the man up then. Tell him it’s for me. Have him put the stuff on my account,” I added, knowing better than to put cash money in Bina’s hand, poor thing. “Then you run right back here, quick as you can. No lingering on the way.”

The girl was there where I’d left her, slumped on the cushion, nodding off over the brazier. Better get her to bed before she fell over onto the floor.

I spoke to her and she looked up at me with those strange light eyes of hers. She said something back, a question, by the tone of her voice. What could I tell her?  I just motioned for her to get up and come with me.

She followed me peaceably enough down the hall, stumbling a little in the dark, letting me lead her. I have to say that she didn’t act very wild.

I pushed open the door to an empty room, lit the lamp, and stretched out the pallet the other girls had rolled up so neatly when Rashi left us to get married.

The girl let me skin her out of the torn wrapper that hid her nakedness, but not the indigo scarf around her head; she clutched at that with a desperate fierceness that I had no intention of battling. I’d get it from her later, when she was asleep after I’d dosed her good and proper. All her clothing would have to be washed, maybe burned—lice can get a brothel a bad name quicker than the pox. She wrapped her arms around herself and shuddered with a chill. She’d need something to wear, something that wouldn’t draw any more attention to her than necessary.  

As she stood there, looking around the room in a bewildered sort of way, I held the lamp up to get a better look at her patchwork of bruises, cuts, and scrapes.  That child looked like she’d been in your better class of bar-fight. “Who did this to you?” I wondered aloud.

She answered me with gibberish.

She was feverish—I knew that from the shivering and the burning skin—but not so much to be delirious. I listened to her babble carefully, trying to make out some meaning.

My establishment caters to people from all over, not just local folks but all kinds of random contracts blown in from who-knows-where to work on the mine or the roads. But this girl’s jabber—well, I tried, but I couldn’t make out any echo of any accent or rhythm I’d ever heard before. Not a single familiar shape. She really must be one of them, I thought, one of those wild people that live in down in that little strip of jungle between the mine and the sea.

Pretty mild-mannered for a wildman, though. When I pressed on the hot swelling near her wound, she jerked and caught her breath, but she didn’t duck away from me. Hurt dogs are like that too, sometimes. They may not understand what you’re doing, but they can tell you’re trying to help.

When Bina came back with the medicine, I sent her to bring my doctoring kit, another lamp, and the pot of leftover tea I’d left cooling by the brazier. That gash needed seeing to—cleaning, and probably packing, too. I might have to open it up to clear out the pus. I thought about waiting until morning—better light would help—but the red streaks spreading out down the girl’s back made me decide that sooner was better. It usually is.

“You have to have a name if I’m going to boss you around.” The little stray’s eyebrows scrunched; she was trying hard to understand me. The girl wasn’t simple, not exactly—just couldn’t talk, or not so it would help her, at any rate.

I pointed to myself and said, “Boss Lady.” I said it again and she repeated it after me, giving an odd, drawn-out liquid sound to the l. But close enough. “Good. Boss Lady. That’s me. Now who are you?”  I pointed at her and saw understanding rise in those strange tawny eyes.

“Binpoy,” she answered, pointing at her heart. “Binpoy.”

I gestured for Binpoy to lie down on the pallet.

I had Bina stay with me in case I’d need someone to hold the girl—Binpoy—down, but it wasn’t necessary. She took Mr. Ghilly’s pills willingly enough, but when I handed her the fever powder, I could tell she’d never held a paper packet in her life. I showed her how to open the flanges of the little envelope and tip it up to pour the fine grains into the back of her throat. She grimaced at the bitter taste. I handed her a mug of sugared milk to wash it down.

She took a swallow, paused with the cheap ceramic rim still at her lips, and looked up at me with an odd expression, as if she could tell that I’d mixed some sleepy-drops into the drink. The moment seemed to stretch out as she searched in my eyes, and then she seemed to decide something, some choice I hadn’t even known was on the table. She drank down the rest of the milk in long throbbing swallows and lay down on her stomach in front of me.

“Okay,” I said to Bina, “hold her down.”

But Binpoy held her own self down—rigid and quivering, but still, while I scrubbed out the ragged flesh with tepid tea—just some twitching that she couldn’t help.

By the time I’d packed the wound—far too late to stitch it up—and dressed it, Binpoy was whuffling with poppy snores. Good. She wouldn’t remember much of this night’s business.

I swabbed off her other hurts, the cut under her chin and the scrapes on her arms and legs, and painted them with salve. In the middle of it all, someone started pounding on the Happy Palace’s door. Drunk, by the sound of it. I told Bina to go and tell them to wait. Nobody opens my door but me. That’s the rule.

 “Maybe blood poisoning won’t carry you off after all,” I muttered as I threw a light blanket over her bare skin. In her sleep she was starting to shiver again. Another chill. Have to get this child some clothes, I reminded myself, as I stripped the blue scarf from around her head to let her brain cool from the fever. A long braid plopped onto the pillow, red-brown like no hair I’d ever seen.

As I turned to the door, shaking out the indigo fabric, a rain of feathers fluttered to the floor: scarlet, yellow, blue, green. One had the sheen of peacock’s tail-eyes. One was brown, dull as dirt. I gathered them up again—they must have been important to the girl, hidden away like that in her turban—and laid them on her pack by the foot of her bed, seven, in all.

I went to let in my waiting customer.

Binpoy was up before the rest of us in the morning. Could have killed us all in our sleep; evidently the wildman world keeps early hours. Earlier, at least, than my girls, all rolled up on their pallets until noon, like caterpillars waiting for the rains.

I found her wandering around the place with her blanket wrapped around her like a bath towel and her little pack slung over her good shoulder. I think she was trying to find a way out. Good thing I key-locked the front door. Mr. Ghilly’s medicine had done the trick; the girl’s fever had broken during the night and she might have wandered off down the street wrapped up like a bite of man-bait.

Damn that miner. What had he gotten me into?  “She goes her own way,” he’d insisted. Easy enough to say, but this girl was a baby, a baby with the body of a juicy half-grown woman. If I let her walk out into the hungry world outside the Palace’s walls, she’d be in someone’s clutches before an hour passed, sellers or Guards, maybe, who’d hand her on up the line as a novelty, to end up in a menagerie somewhere. That was no life. Not for anyone.

But I couldn’t keep her locked up forever. If I’d wanted to be a jailer, I would have chosen a different line of work. Sure, I keep my door locked and my windows shuttered with nice strong slats. But that’s to protect my girls. They understand the reasons. If they want out, all they have to do is ask. Just tell me where they’re going and when they’ll be back. It’s a rough town and I don’t want anyone wandering off alone where something might happen.

But that’s different. My girls are smart, mostly. They know how to handle themselves out there and how to back away from trouble. This girl… 

I got Binpoy out of the blanket and into an old dress from the trunk Rashi had left behind. I should never have let that miner—whatever was his name, anyway?—foist her onto me. Worse than taking in a stray cat.