Silent City by Sarah Davis-Goff

Author:Sarah Davis-Goff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

The Way Back

There is a story of a witch who lives in the very north, a powerful woman who has learned to use the skrake for her own ends.

This woman lives in the woods, in a cabin by a stream, tending her fowl and her garden. She keeps company with her dogs, the forest animals, birds and deer, and the skrake, which do not harm her, but help her catch little children.

It’s a story the breeders tell their children, I understand, though why children need any stories more frightening than the skrake to keep them quiet in the city I don’t know. Frightening women are maybe easier to imagine if you’ve never seen a skrake.

The story changes, I suppose, when the girls grow into women and have their own. They retell the story from what they can remember or imagine. It’s the only way to pass down these stories, the only way in which they can be kept, for women who are not taught to read.

Just one generation without learning and it’s gone forever. Whoever made the decision not to teach the next girls to read—some time after my mothers, Mam and Maeve, escaped from the city—they knew what they were doing. Whatever knowledge can be got from the older generations, whatever might have been learned from the books, is gone. For the women, at least, and the men too, in the shanties and on the wall. For us, nothing new can be learned. Nothing old can be kept pristine. Old words and ideas are turned over and passed along by story, by voice, in a city where women are voiceless. But there’s beauty there too, in stories carried only by memory, from past to present to future. There’s a type of learning there as well, in what each voice brings to the stories.

These are the thoughts I have as we make our laborious way back in.

Behind me, Mare stumbles, her hands tied and a blindfold on. She knows where she’s going better than any of us but we are doing things by the book. You never know what might have changed in the city since we were gone—a newer leader even than Boyle, a fire, a skrake—and we don’t know for sure we won’t meet anyone else out here, unlikely though it seems.

So, Sene and Mare say their goodbyes, foreheads resting against each other for a moment, and I take the lead as troop leader. I wanted Agata but she said me. The others went with her. It’ll be Ash or management, I suppose, who make the final call, or at least it would be if we were staying.

This is the plan we have made. Sene will report Mare for speaking about her wish to leave. We’ll back her up. Mare will be punished. When the city is gathered by Boyle in a day or two or whenever he decrees, he’ll ask me to speak again. I’ll ask everyone if they want to go, and I say that we’ll protect people wanting to leave, as best we can.

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