Free Sinners and the Sea by Rebecca Kanner

be on her own bowl. Then I held the cream out to the child. Hurry, child, I thought, drink before your mother notices your cream. She smiled at me and clapped her hands together before taking it. My heart lightened for the second time in the two moons since I had left my father’s tent. The girl had not been harmed by the drunken men who now lay in the road. Perhaps it was her slowness that kept her from becoming as hardened and mean as everyone else.
    When I raised my gaze from the child’s face, I saw that Javan was eyeing me thoroughly from head to toe. Then she rested her gaze on my stomach. “Is there a brat in your belly yet?”
    “I do not know.”
    She smiled. “But he thinks there is.” She did not so much ask me as tell me.
    I waited for her to finish the milk so I could take her bowl and wish her well, but she left a couple of drops to prevent me from doing this. I kept my hands at my sides and tried not to frown too deeply. I was hoping Javan would not prevent me from looking after her daughter sometimes.
    “What is your name?” I asked the girl.
    She just smiled.
    “She comes to ‘simpleton,’ ” Javan said.
    “But what did you call her when she was born?”
    “It does not matter now.”
    “It does matter,” I said sharply.
    “So then what is your name? Or do you want to go on being called demon woman?”
    “I do not have a name.”
    Javan raised an eyebrow. Had she heard the anger in my voice and the shame beneath it? “Well, do you at least have more milk, perhaps some goat meat?” she asked.
    “No wonder there is so much of you.”
    She laughed. “Yes, there is plenty to make a man comfortable.”
    Before I could think better of it, I said, “Do you do nothing besides copulate all day and night?”
    “Yes. I just killed two men.”
    I had somehow forgotten this, and she must have enjoyed the shock on my face. I suddenly wondered what she had done to earn the X upon her forehead.
    “With a pot you gave me,” she added.
    I got more milk and dried goat meat for both her and the child. “Now tell me the child’s name,” I said.
    “She is Herai.” The girl did not react as her mother said this; she just kept smiling up at me. “She likes you,” Javan said. “Perhaps due to her slowness. I myself prefer whoring to mothering. Men’s appetites can be sated, but children’s grow just as quickly as their bodies do. You will know soon enough.”
    If I have to feed an appetite larger than Noah’s, I do not think there will be much left of me.
    Javan seemed to enjoy talking, and I did not know anybody else, so I asked her, “How does the town sustain itself? I see no crops.”
    “Do not be simple, woman.”
    I would not be checked. “And why do the men fight among themselves while they are here in Sorum, where surely they are not being rewarded?”
    “The men are hired as soldiers by any tribe with enough meat and wine to pay them. When no tribe needs them, the weapons, teeth, and bones of other mercenaries are reward enough for battle. They are gamblers, of a sort. Besides, they know nothing else.” Though she had not answered my first question, she waited for some sort of response from me. When there was none, she asked, “What is it you do when Noah is too far away to rut you?”
    I should not have spoken so carelessly of Noah. But I had not gotten to talk with anyone besides him in two moons, and he did not actually talk with me. He talked at me. “I make clothes that Noah gives away, and blankets he takes from my loom before I have had a chance to knot the last yarns. I never see them again, not even when I look at the people he has given them to.”
    “The men prefer to wear the clothes of the dead. Who would be foolish enough to wear new clothes and risk having his life taken so that his clothes could be cut off of him?”
    “Then what do the men do with the clothes Noah gives them?”
    “Give them away in exchange for the very things Noah is always telling them not to