Free The Family Tree by Sheri S. Tepper Page A

time she spoke they flew from her mouth like butterflies that had hatched beneath her tongue, leaving her with no idea how they came there. “Do you ever feel that, Nassifeh?” she asked me. “That our words are not our own, that they were given to us by someone…someone else?”
    I told her of course they had, by our parents and they by their parents, but this was not what she meant. “Why should this be hairbrush ?” she asked. “Why should it not be amthrup ? It could as well be. Who decided upon hairbrush ?”
    I thought about it, then told her that if each of us decided on our own words for things, we would not be able to speak together.
    “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant that some words feel very strange in my mouth, as thoughthey were not born there. As though my word would have been a different one.”
    I never figured out what she meant.
    My father enjoyed working for Sultan Tummyfat, so he always told us, but when the sultan went away for a while and Great-tooth took the regency, my father quit talking about his work. He said nothing either good or bad about the regent, except once I heard him muttering to himself, a growl in which he uttered the regent’s name like a curse.
    The worst day of my life was my tenth birthday. Mother gave me a new mantle, and father gave me a treasure box and invited me to go to the market with him. I put on the mantle, put the treasure box deep into the pocket, and off we went to the fruiterers lane, stopping at the booths run by various peoples from various lands, armakfatidi and pheledas and kasturi. The fruiterers market smelled of ocris and oranges, dawara and dates, mangoes and marvellos, and the vendors always gave me bits to taste while Father haggled over prices and qualities and arranged for baskets, sacks, and boxes to be delivered to the kitchens of the sultan. Father was chewing a dried apricot with an expression of concentration on his face when the pheled guards came out of nowhere, seized him up, then seized me up as well when I shouted and ran after Father. The guards took us to the palace. Great-tooth was seated beneath the canopy of justice, like a toad under a leaf, the crier beside him trumpeting words of accusation—so I learned later. At the time, I had no idea what was going on. The executioner was waiting beside the block, all his teeth showing in a ferocious grin, and Father had not even time to claim innocence before his head was off. I started to run to him, only to scramble frantically away again at the smell of the blood, the horror of the severed head, while all the time Great-tooth merely stared at me as though I had been a bug of some kind.
    The guards caught me and took me to the harimlek,the female part of the palace, where they turned me over to old Bluethumb.
    “Where do you live, child?” she asked me.
    Between sobs and screams, I told the old one where I lived, and Bluethumb, after some conversation with this one and that one, sent me home with a guard. When we got there, the house was torn all apart and Mama’s body was lying in the courtyard, all broken from falling off the roof.
    Later I was told that the news of Father’s execution had come quickly, and Mama had feared death less than she’d feared the torturers. Great-tooth had been known to kill one member of a family and then torture the others to death to amuse himself. Guards had come to search the house, as well, but that had been after Mama was dead.
    The guard who took me home was bored, but kind.
    “Gather up what you want to take with you,” he said. “You can’t stay here alone. I’ll take you back to Bluethumb.”
    What was there to take? What I had on my back; what I could find among the clutter of the looted house. My other clothing. My books. There had been other, more valuable things in the house, but someone had already stolen them, and it wasn’t much of a bundle that I carried back to the harim.
    “What did my father do?” I begged,