Power Play

“You must go to him,” Naomi told her quietly. “If you do not, you will be taken to him by the other men, and that will be worse. Better to endure what must be with your pride intact.”

“Even though my body might be destroyed!” Layla cried hysterically. She was still young enough to want to cling to her mother and weep tears of fear, but Naomi was right. And her mother would not be able to protect her, no matter how much the tribe might revere her.

It was a night that would haunt Layla for the rest of her short life. She went to Rafe’s van sick with fear. When she managed to crawl out of it hours later when he had finally fallen asleep her body was a mass of bruises and raised weals.

Naomi bathed them for her, her own eyes stinging with tears, but there was nothing she could say. Layla looked at her with the eyes of a wildcat caught in a snare. Her daughter’s spirit was as broken as her body.

Layla did not have the stoicism to endure such physical abuse; hatred for Rafe was the only emotion she could feel now. Not even to her mother could she describe the things he had done to her; the manner in which he had abused her, taking her not as a man but as a perverted animal. Her body shook as she tried to blot out what had happened. Naomi gave her a soothing potion to drink, thinking to help her sleep, but while her mother’s back was turned, Layla poured it away.

She could not endure another night like this one; she would not endure it.

While the rest of the camp slept she crept silently away. The constable on duty at the police station listened to her story in stunned shock, wondering whether or not to believe it. The sergeant, woken from his bed and brought grumbling to the station, took one look at Layla’s white, bitter face, and knew that he had found the motive for Duncan’s death.

They arrested Rafe at dawn; and he was sentenced to death two months later. He never reached the hangman’s noose. Somehow, from somewhere, he obtained a secret poison. He was found dead in his cell one morning, his body already stiffening, his eyes glaring bitterly into emptiness.

The rest of the tribe shunned Layla. They elected a new leader, who decreed that Naomi must be allowed to stay among them, but that Layla must leave.

When Naomi discovered that her daughter was pregnant, she pleaded with the tribe for clemency, and it was granted; Layla would remain as an outcast from the tribe, but she would be allowed to travel with them.

Her daughter’s frail, wraithlike condition appalled Naomi. The thought of the coming child was the only thing that kept her alive. Duncan’s child. Layla said the words over and over again to herself like a mantra.

“It could be Rafe’s child,” Naomi told her.

Layla shook her head, and looked at her mother with eyes far too old for such a childish face.

“No, it could not. He did not take me as a man takes a woman; he did not spill his seed inside me.”

Rachel Lee was born to her mother during her eighth month of pregnancy. To see Layla’s thin, almost sticklike body bloated almost obscenely with her pregnancy caused Naomi almost constant pain. Some fierce spirit seemed to burn in Layla, giving her a pride and a determination she had never thought to see in her fey, spoiled child.

The birth was a difficult one, and although they paused to listen to the cries coming from the caravan, none of the other women came to help. Naomi did not mind. She was an experienced midwife, and the child was well positioned, although perhaps a trifle large for Layla’s emaciated frame.

It was only when she placed the child in her daughter’s arms that she saw Layla smile properly for the first time since Duncan’s death.

“She is beautiful,” she told her mother. “You will call her Rachel, and you will love her for me, won’t you, Mother?”

Already a swift-flowing river of red blood was carrying Layla away from them, and Naomi knew it could not be staunched; that her daughter was dying. She had known it from the moment Layla gave birth. In some ways she felt her daughter had willed herself to stay alive only as long as she carried her child. She had in any case been as one dead to the rest of the tribe from the moment she betrayed Rafe.

There was no burial pyre for Layla, no grieving or lamenting for the brief life so quickly extinguished, and although the tribe accepted Naomi, little Rachel grew up knowing that she was not truly part of it; that there was something mysterious about her own birth and the death of her mother, that set her apart from the others.

She soon learned that her mother’s name was one that must never be spoken and that she and Naomi were allowed to stay with the tribe as a favour rather than as a right.

Her pain at the way she was excluded was something she learned to cloak with pride and indifference, and she was soon being described as far too much her mother’s daughter. She was not popular with the other children, and she knew it. It made her only more aloof and withdrawn. Only Naomi loved her, only Naomi stood between her and the hostility of the others.

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