My Soul Tattooed In Black- Part 1
The first time I heard Astridore’s voice was the night the Temple burned. My Yiayia, great grandmother Hildegard brought me to the room of prophecy in Astridore’s temple. Thick wax candles on iron candelabras standing about the room lit the ancient bookshelves filled with family records and copies of books on botany and gemology. Thick wooden cases stained with drops of the essential oils they housed stood next to a well-worn table covered in small pin hammers and broken remnants of gemstones and a large bronze bowl and a pestle that glittered in the candlelight. Yiayia wanted to get her book of Tholos myths for me to read. I stood in the doorway while my Yiayia navigated the twisty path to the bookshelf like she could see it and ran her knobbled hands covered in gemstone words that flickered with light over the leather covers of the books until she found the one she wanted, on the farthest corner of the highest shelf her short stature could reach. I don’t know if the book was heavier then she remembered or if, for a moment, she forgot where all the candelabras were in the room, but all I could do was watch as halfway across the room she tripped on one of the candelabra’s feet when she readjusted her grip on the book of myths. I watched as my Yiayia fell heavily on her fragile knees and the candelabra went toppling into the table, lighting the boxes of essential oils on fire. Yiayia shoved the book toward me, away from the source of heat and started calling, in a voice made strong by her desperation, for my father and uncles.
“We have to save the records! Alexander, get Sabrine out of here! Eadmund! Asa! Help me save the books!”
My Yiayia died from the smoke that night and my uncles couldn’t save all of our records. That night was the first time I heard Astridore’s voice.
“Your Yiayia is safe, my little peace-keeper.”
“Are you mad at her? Because the books were burned?” I wanted to know. My Baba, grandmother Bernice, was fiercely protective of the books and her newly blind eyes had glistened with tears when my Uncle Asa told her how many we had lost. I ran my tiny hands over the large book on my bedside table. Yiayia had told me to read it and so I would.
“No dear. Those books were not as important as your Baba would lead you to believe. Precautions were put in place to protect Tholos’ history long ago.”
“So, should I tell Baba not to worry about it?” I pulled the book of origins off the table and wrapped my small arms around the book that was the same size as my chest. I was scared if I told my Baba that I still had the book she would take it from me. She had demanded we give her all that had been saved.
“I can talk to your Baba, so don’t you worry about it my sweet one.”
“Are you leaving now?” Astridore was so calm compared to all the stories my family told me.
“I’m always around when you need me child.”
I wake to my cheek pressed against the cool cobblestone floor of my jail cell. I can feel the tenderness of bruises forming high on my cheekbones and across my ribs and abdomen. My joints are sore and they have seized up in the cold of my cell. It feels like my left arm is wretched out of its socket and manacled to the wall behind me. Just below the band of iron I can see the glinting of gemstones that had been ground into the ink of the tattoo I had gotten the week before. I hoped I had done enough for the radiant gemstones to overpower the bone ash in the ink and tell me that my mission was complete, but that wouldn’t happen until I actually did what I had been sent to do on my twenty-first birthday.
I knew exactly where I was despite the canvas bag over my head. The smell of old books and ash assaulted my nose and the metal braces that bound my left arm to the table prevented me from escaping the legacy of my family. The skin of my wrist prickled with a numbing heat, right across the “vein of fate” where every member of my family had received their first mission for generations.
The first mission was always the hardest to deal with because you had no choice but to fulfill it. This tattoo would be inescapable proof that I was part of a family I never wanted to belong in.
I heard my Baba’s voice as it flowed around the room asking Astridore to bless the needles that would mark my skin. She beseeched her to guide me in my mission so that it might be accomplished quickly and that I be able to move onto the next. There would never be a next. I vowed to complete this mission as fast as possible and after that keep that prophetic needle as far from my skin as I possibly can. I don’t want the guilt that comes with the ink. I had never wanted to be like my cousins, who flaunted their gemstone embedded skin like their completed missions were victory flags instead of sins.
I heard my Baba throwing things into the fire. Tendrils of sage smoke crept up my nostrils. I knew, theoretically, what went into the ink that would mark my arm. Baba would pick a bone from our family catacombs and throw it into the fire until it blackened and cracked into splinters from the heat. She would pull the splinters from the fire with silver tongs and put them into a large bronze bowl with glyphs for strength and insight. Small pieces of semiprecious gemstones would be put into the bowl with essential oils Baba made. I could hear the pestle cracking bone splinters and grinding gemstones to dust so that it could form a thick paste that the needle would be dipped into before each pierce of my skin, until the tattoo was finished. Then Baba began to tell me of the mantle I would one day be expected to take up.
“Sabrine, you are the only female in your generation. After your Aunt Irene and myself have joined our ancestors, it will be your job to make the ink and mark the missions onto skin. It is our legacy. Only the Matriarch can do this. Now that you have begun your missions your daily lessons will increase so that you receive all the knowledge necessary to be the head of the family.”
I will the skin on my wrist to change color. I want the black ink to fade into the earthy tones my Baba told me it would turn to when I completed my mission.
Baba had stopped grinding the pestle and I heard the screeching of bronze meeting silver as Baba filled the needle. “You, my dear, were a difficult one. It was almost like the stones didn’t want to be chosen for you, but they spoke to me in the end. Peridot for balance, Rhodonite for grace, Ruby for prosperity and devotion, Tanzanite for magic, and Tiger’s Eye for protection, it is a good mix for the rest of your life Sabrine.” It was like sitting in another one of my Baba’s lessons on gemology, only this time I couldn’t take notes. “Properties that all future matriarchs’ should have, with Eucalyptus for healing and Dragon’s Blood for acts of war, it will make you an unparalleled force on your missions as well. Astridore could not have given me an heir with more potential.”
Baba had finished marking my skin and started massaging a thick cooling lotion into my wrist. “When your mission is done the tattoo will turn a myriad of greens, reds and browns. All earth and fire just like you, my dear.” She lifted the canvas bag from my head and I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to the dim fire-lit room. I met her blue cataract covered eyes, praying I would die before I had to become the next blind prophet of the family. I knew I would find no respite in her vacant gaze so I turned my head from her to my wrist. What I saw there sent spiders walking down my spine. Written in freshly mixed black ink was the death sentence I had jokingly wished for. There, engraved in my Baba’s flowing script, was my first mission: Kill the King.
This mission is the reason I am even stuck in this cell, in pain, waiting for a rescue from my family that will never come. If I can’t complete my mission I am no use to them at all.
I use my right arm to force my body upright and use it to lean heavily on the wall while I try to anchor my wobbling feet. After I am steady, I force myself to work through the pain in my left shoulder as I wrap both hands around the chain keeping me locked to the wall of the cell. I pull with as much strength as my aching body can summon, trying to wretch the pin anchoring the chain out of the wall. My hope is that if I could pull it from the wall then I could have both the freedom to move about my cell and a weapon.
I can’t stand the silence anymore. I scream into the empty space of my cell. “Do you think this is funny?” My left arm sends hot slashes of pain up and down my body until I can no longer use it to pull the chain and drop it to my side, but still I frantically use my right arm to try and pull the stupid pin from the wall. “This is all your fault. What kind of god are you? To give me this curse on my wrist!”
I know I will seem crazy to my jailer who probably sits just out of my line of sight. Hopefully he is ignoring me as I act like a banshee. I know that my behavior does not help the fact that people think my family and I are ‘Dangerous to Society.’ “I did not want this! You knew I didn’t want this! You knew I didn’t want anything to do with the family legacy. I wanted to be normal. To be able to walk down the street without people trying to read my skin and you telling me if they would be a threat or not! I want to marry who I want because they love me and I love them, not because you have Baba tattoo his name on my skin! I want to see any grandchildren I might have.”
I can see it. What my life would be like if I continued on the path Astridore and my family want me to take. Other than Cyrus, no one has shown any interest in me, the fear of my family is so potent that most men in my generation give me a wide berth. Cyrus was probably the one man who would ever love me. There I’ll be, locked in the Temple of Astridore, unable to leave without the assistance of one of my cousin’s children. My only constant companion will be Astridore’s voice in my head, informing me of everything going on in her creation, giving me the missions to go onto fresh skin. Alone in the dark, much like I am now.
“What kind of idiotic god are you to put your chosen through this! I don’t want to be feared or resented…I didn’t want any of this.”
“Why would you not want to be feared?”
Oh, by all that is blessed by Astridore, the person who locked me in this musty hell.
“Hello, Your Majesty. How has your day been?” I turn and stare into the frigid jade eyes of the person I was supposed to kill. With my tattered scarlet skirts clutched in my one un-manacled hand I drop into a curtsy two inches too high to be respectful, and I never once avert my gaze.
“Quite eventful if I must say.” A smirk forms on his thin lips and his age spotted hands get shoved into the pockets of his gold waistcoat with the thumbs sticking out. “Someone tried to kill me at my son’s birthday tonight. Isn’t that the most interesting story you have ever heard?”
“How terrible. How do you know that this person tried to kill you? You’re obviously not dead.” I know who tried to kill him. I wasn’t very discrete.
“Both my plate and glass were poisoned, if my taster’s cold body in the cellar is any sort of proof.” I, personally, don’t like to use poison. It can be a bit messy and blame would be placed on my family almost immediately. They don’t need the repercussions of my actions. If I am perfectly honest I planned on being caught, but the food and wine. I had no opportunity to get into the kitchen to lace his place setting.
“Obviously an amateur’s work.” Making him talk about all the ways he might have died tonight is really quite fun, even if those ways weren’t my plan.
“Yes, obviously. The next was a poison-laced smoking jacket, but in their application, the poisoner singed the velvet trim. “
“Another amateur mistake.”
“Yes…it really was quite a shame too because I loved that smoking jacket. It was a gift from my son.” He just stares at me. I think he wants me to cry, to break in some way, own up to the plans he was telling me about but he didn’t understand. I had no hand in those attempts so I feel no guilt in trying to kill him. If I’m honest, his death is one of those things I would have wished to appear on one of my cousin’s skin. I would have sought them out and been the tactician of that mission, covered all the bases. King Cadeyrn would have to wait for any reaction from me because unlike every other person he has antagonized, I know what to expect.