Coral was convinced the drum talkers were speaking of her. I knew they had better things to speak of than her beauty, however famed in our village and those villages near, but she would bear none of this sense. She thought she fancied them, one or all, but I saw her shudder involuntarily when their mouths opened in a laugh, revealing the raw stubs where tongues used to be. They would not marry, or bear children of their own; there was nothing of the regular round of life for these men. Their lives were the taut skins of their drums, the tight yellows and ochres; the heart’s thump, sounding out a language whose particulars we were familiar with only in part. They had been betji slaves once, as young boys, made un-men in gross situations and having developed the communication of slaves when their mouth-words were taken from them. We were fortunate for the group in our village, seven in all, their musical warnings carrying much further than a voice would, and their senses heightened by a youth of perilous servitude.

Yet Coral persisted, always most interested in that which would garner her the most trouble, the most attention, the reluctant but inevitable affection from all for her wild behaviors. She was beloved, my cousin, daughter of my mother’s younger sister, ward of my family and an eighth hungry mouth. Her own mother died in childbirth and her father was unknown, likely a handsome traveler, by her fair looks. For her prettiness and her blessed welcome, motherless, my own mother doted on her more than she did any of her other children. She hoped, I think, that the luck of this child would spill over onto one of us, overwhelmed as Coral was with blessings. Her tattoos were coal black and glistening: a squat huddle of mushrooms blossomed on one shoulder, a fawn with delicately bent neck made a shy softness of her too often exposed middle. The ink took to her skin like a blush, the embellishments seeming natural, the protectives strong. She was two years my senior, and an enviable beauty.

We were to each have a tattoo this year, as it would be until we were no longer able to bear children. We were made canvases of distractions as women, the emblems that adorned our skin both signs of developing maturity and symbolic guardians, both for ourselves and, more importantly, any child we might carry. I guessed that Coral would be married soon after her third marking, and she teased that I would be a woman obscured entirely before my own marriage. I was in no hurry, and the sting of last year’s needle had not yet left me. The creature upon my neck had been intended as a long-beaked and graceful stork, a water bird, but I had squirmed so and wailed at the pain that the artist had grown hasty and irritated. I was marred instead by a crooked body, all angles and half-sketched feathers, a fierce and serious face that did not seem so much to protect as to threaten. I liked stroking my neck where I knew the neck of the bird to be, something soothing, I thought, for us both.

A girl was declared a woman at fourteen years whether she had begun to bleed before or no, and the tattoo was the first and only overt sign of this change. In nearly all other ways our lives continued as they had, though generally our activities were more closely monitored, and we were oft encouraged to find a mate suitable for more than play. My mother made no pretenses with me, and I knew enough of the pairings between a man and a woman to desire nothing of the sort for myself. I did not truly have a choice, I knew, but there was time yet to pretend. Between my two elder sisters, both mothers and miserable, who delighted in tormenting me, and Coral, who simply could not stop mooning, I hoped for madness before marriageable age.

Coral was giggling again, a watery sound in the back of her throat, like a stream bubbling.

“I’ve half a pack more than you’ve got, Bea, and it’s nearly dusk!”

Coral re-adjusted the weight of wood chaff on her back, and I made no comment as to her being nearly a head and shoulders taller than I, with strength comparable to her size. Instead I continued to move through the cutting fields, gathering the spoils which we would use to make paper, to shape candles, to stamp into the mud of our out buildings where the animals were kept. I did not look forward to the tiresome domestic work, preferring to be outside, in the woods or the fields, the quiet-belly places of the world. I could not ignore, however, the shortening days, the ever-quickening chill of the morning. I shivered slightly as the sun crept closer to the horizon, and wished I had not been so stubborn as to leave my jacket in favor of lighter clothes.

My feet kicked up little eddies of wood dust, and I began to shuffle, a small dance to better determine the shapes and directions of the billowed remains. The light had faded to the cool blue of deep-autumn, the promise of winter soon after, and I extended my arms in the gathering shade, my body circling and turning the stiff, wide-bottomed broom I carried to gather chaff. Coral joined me when my movements had taken a shape she could follow, the two of us like the heads of molting dandelions, all fluff and no face.

Now thoroughly stirred up, I gathered the motes on a damp cloth, these minute particles best for the fine papers we reserved for those messages that would need to travel far. Coral followed me again in this, and only when there was light enough to see between our faces and no more, did we turn and start for home.

Armed men with torches waited on the edge of the cutting field to escort us and all others who had worked outside the wall that day back within. We did not usually take such risks, but the hurried nature of our work this late in the season left us little choice. If we were to survive the winter, which would, by the turn of the weathers, be a long one, we had to take advantage of every moment given in the day. Coral and I had our fair share of work, being responsible both for those things younger siblings would have done, had we had any, and those duties required of us as young and able women. I bedded and woke aching, every day.

We were joined by several of the other young women of our village, their child siblings staggering at their sides in varying degrees of tiredness. I looked in the faces of the young ones and knew they had been at the hunts today. They were the right age for it.

“What a dirty pair you make.” This from Mag, a woman nineteen and unwed, bitter to her core. An inked sparrow wheeled across her brow.

“We would not be burden to our family.” Coral replied, her mouth suggestive of a repressed smile. Her words would have reminded Mag quite sharply that she was quite taxing on her family, having yet to find a mate or means of supporting herself. I tired of these games among us, the cold and meaningless words thrown from one to another. Coral engaged the other women eagerly, her wit a shallow and superficial sort of triumph. My refusal to participate left me blissfully ignored, but that did not spare my ears their persistent nonsense.

I followed the light of the torches as we began to move forward, eyes fixed on the burning beacons and ears reaching for the subtle sounds of the night, more pure and more dangerous than the littleness that erupted from the mouths of the women on either side of me.

“But one man-cousin in your house left to be wedded out.” Mag continued, her head inclined to Coral, her eyes acid green in the torchlight. “How cold your bed will be this winter.”

It was highly insulting of her to suggest such trysts, for no close union would produce healthy young, and Coral was too near related to our family. Mag was a viper, and I wondered if I wouldn’t find a tattoo of that creature somewhere on her form.

“No colder than I am used.” Coral said lightly, her face a picture of composure. “I imagine I shall come to you for advice should my bed clothes grow too chill, seasoned as you are.”

I sighed, bone-weary of work and fools.

We found our way within the wall without any trouble. It did not come as a great surprise, as things were more often quiet than otherwise. I gazed up at the tall wooden pikes, lashed three deep together, and was comforted. The kosackt did not come restless as often as they had in earlier years, but that did not keep us from relying on the same practices that had allowed us to live generations in the wilds. The last great terror had been the night of my birth, which was of course taken as a doom as opposed to a blessing, and there had been only a handful of encounters since then, with lives lost out of carelessness, only.

Small children, their parents having neither the funds to dwell within the walls or hasten their young ones to proper education, raced about, faces grime-smeared in the torchlight. They held their hands out for coin, a beggar’s look perfected in their minute features. Coral, tenderhearted, took a dull copper from the purse hanging down under her long blouse and pressed it into the hand of the nearest child. I hadn’t any coin, but there was dark bread with raisins left from my lunch, and this I passed among them. The young men at watch at the gates pretended they did not see us, for we were encouraged by our elders to pay these folk no mind, so that they might leave our wall for elsewhere. Their mud and brush homes, however, had the look of permanence after years untroubled, and their children grew numerous when none were snatched away in the night. There were not many among us that could watch a family go hungry, driven into the wild, as we were but a few steps and a sturdy wall from a similar fate.

The drum talkers sounded the closing of the gates, the rumble of their beaten words carrying out across the night. Coral glanced up to where they perched in the plank nests made up for their purpose and gave a little wave, and though none seemed to respond, she remained cheerful the whole of our walk home.

The house was lit brightly, and it was clear to me from the shadows flickering in the windows that we had company. Mother opened the door to us, and her false smile sent my nerves rattling.

“In girls, in and quickly.” She pushed us through the doorway, the warmth from within enveloping. Mother began to pull Coral’s pack from her back with one hand, using the other to smooth Coral's hair. I unloaded my pack to the floor, a glance in the polished plate mirror that hung in the hall alerting me to the numerous smudges my face boasted. I wiped my cheeks with my sleeve, though suspected I succeeded only in evening the layer of dirt and wood dust.