There were supposed to be pity scraps, weren’t there? The rotted produce that didn’t sell in the market. And the buckets were supposed to be refilled because someone remembered the men didn’t have the strength to pull their own from the nearest village well. Because someone cared enough that we didn’t die of thirst. But the buckets ran out of water a few weeks after I joined the men in the commune.
I saw a man vanish one morning, his rotted dog mask clattering to the broken stone tiles in the middle of the commune. I felt compelled to trace the fading pattern on the mask, the nose, the mouth, the long, floppy ears, one half broken. I hoped it wasn’t hunger or thirst that had killed him. How long were these men going without food or water? How could I have been so lost in myself that I hadn’t noticed? I’d hardly eaten myself.
The men were lying in front of their shacks, moaning. One man was half in a shack, half out, rolling around and pawing for an empty bucket. He scooped imaginary water with the scoop beside it, lifted the empty ladle up under his mask, and grunted when the ladle fell from his grip, clattering to the ground. “Water … ” It was the first word I’d heard him speak that wasn’t the name of his goddess.
“Water,” another man nearby joined in.
“Water,” they all repeated.
I wanted to roll on the ground beside them. I wanted to not want water, to let myself vanish with the life I knew.
But thirst won out. As did the constant chorus of “water” punctuated by the names of women from around the village.
Those women couldn’t care less if you starved. I knew it. What I once wouldn’t have given for the problem of the lord to resolve itself without me. For him to suddenly vanish, for me to not know it was my fault.
I stood, fighting the weakness in my legs, and grabbed the nearest empty bucket. Without responding to any of the anguished cries, I headed toward the well at the center of the village, not caring if I drew everyone’s notice as I dragged my feet through the crowd I knew I’d find there.
I drew no one’s attention. And there was no crowd in the market.
Merchants’ stalls were threadbare or empty. There was only a quarter of the amount of produce I expected to find and almost none of the cheese or fabric. The little things that no one needed, even if they were lovely, the gifts that men often bought their goddesses, were gone entirely. The rotting produce that would normally have gone to the commune was for sale at discounted prices, and it was only those cheaper items that the few villagers with baskets were buying.
“Come now,” said one merchant. “Don’t you have a young boy and girl at home? Don’t you want to feed them the best? Look at the color on this tomato!”
A woman who seemed vaguely familiar grimaced and rifled through her basket for a single copper. “No. These.” There was a pile of wilted vegetables in front of her, and she shoved them eagerly into her basket after the man accepted her coin, sighing as he tucked it into a pouch at his waist.
“I suppose no one can afford to pay for your husband’s music no more.” The man put his perfect tomato down gently with both hands in front of a sign that read, “High Quality Produce. Among the Last. 3 Coppers Each.” He scratched his chin. “Why is that, you think? What went wrong? Seems just a few weeks ago, the farmers had more food for us than we knew what to do with.”
The woman tucked a wilted head of lettuce on top of her basket. “I don’t know.” Her lips pinched into a thin line. “Maybe you merchants pay them too little for their crops because you charge too much and no one’s buying. Now they don’t have enough copper to feed themselves anything but what they manage to hoard from the rest of us.”
The merchant yawned and stretched a hand over his head. “But the prices aren’t so different, are they? I know we charged more than this for quality goods just a short time ago. And we had no need to sell this wilted trash.”
I didn’t think the woman cared. “Good day,” she said, curtly. She met my eyes as she passed and looked at me from top to bottom, but she said nothing. I realized my bedraggled appearance wasn’t as out of place as I expected. The woman’s dress was coated in white dust, and I wondered what a musician’s wife was doing to get that way, and who was watching those children the merchant mentioned if she worked.
“No one has enough copper.” The merchant stared overhead, not paying me any mind. “How could so much copper just vanish into thin air? Goddess help us.” He kept muttering to himself and I pushed forward down the path, my eyes widening as I took in the line in front of the well.
They were all tired. No one was quite as tired or hopeless as the men in the commune, but there was something different in the air. Men still had their arms around women, and women still laid their heads against their men’s broad shoulders. But there were fewer smiles and less laughter.
“Thank the goddess water is always free,” said the woman in front of me to her man.