The Pearl Growers

I was twenty-two the first time it happened. My father slapped me so hard that I bit my cheek open and a thin trickle of blood spilled over my tongue while he stood there, jaw locked, holding the pearl in his hand. He looked at it, not me, his eyes only for the smear of light in his palm. I could see he was afraid.

“Never do it again,” my father told me. Then he turned and threw it into the fire.

It didn’t burn, of course. I swept it out the next week when I was clearing out the ashes and it fell into my dustpan, just as bright as it was the day I saw it pushing up underneath the thin skin at my wrist. That first one came so easily, like twisting a seed out of the soft pulp of a pumpkin, barely a sting of pain. Terrified, I buried it again, not in my arm, but at the edge of the cauliflower field, weeping as I shoveled it under the clay-thickened mud. By the next morning, I could already see another one rising, just above my ankle.

My sister and I, panicked, tried every remedy we could think of: hot mustard plasters, charms, prayer, dirt from the shrine steps. I walked in circles, frantically trying to imagine what I’d done to make the pearls take root, and all the while they kept curling and swelling until I couldn’t bear it and was forced to slice them out of my own flesh. We slathered and bandaged and finally stooped to the oldest remedy either of us knew—pricking at my skin with a red-hot pin while we said prayer after prayer until the words jumbled together and fell apart into meaningless sounds. For a whole week we thought we had beaten it back down into my body, but then a little bump began to show on my shin, just below the round knob of my knee.

“There must be a way,” my sister said. But I already knew we had failed. My only chance was to hide it, hide myself, and hope no one glimpsed the secrets rising under my skin. I couldn’t stop running my fingers over the pearls, feeling the way they pushed up out of the muscle, smooth and gleaming. In the right light, I thought they might have been beautiful—but I was living in darkness. I stopped going to the market, stopped going to the dances in the big hay barn on long summer nights. I vanished into the kitchen when callers came and told my father it was sundown fever that kept me in long sleeves. Sweat stained my dresses but the pearls only grew faster, weeds surging upward in the heat.

Our father’s wife caught us, just once, but it was enough: she glimpsed the bloody, shimmering twist in my sister’s hand before I could knock it away into the hay and filth of the barnyard. I swear I saw the calculations start rolling through her head: a new roof, a new harness for the donkey, shoes for her own children, for us too if that would sweeten the idea for our father.

“I’ll sell them as far away as possible,” she told him at dinner that night. “Three towns away. Four. They’ll never know they came from her.”

Our father stared down into his plate. He didn’t tell her no.

They came on a Thursday. We were halfway through mucking out the pens when I saw them silhouetted in the barn doorway, dark shapes suddenly resolving into three soldiers and one man in livery, all strangers. My sister tried to stand in front of me and that alone was enough to give me away. The liveried man gestured, almost bored, and the soldiers knocked her aside like a stray dog being beaten off scraps. He didn’t touch me at all. The soldiers did, twisting my arm up as they dragged me out into the sunlight and ripped my sleeve, tearing it from wrist to shoulder. There were already three growing in the crook of my elbow, each about the size of a nail head, unmistakable. The soldiers stared, and I shuddered at the way their eyes scraped over my flesh.

“The Duke will be pleased,” the man said, and he wasn’t speaking to me.

The soldier held my arm steady while I stepped up into the wagon. I heard my sister cry out but I didn’t look back. I couldn’t make myself turn. I already knew what I would see, her dear familiar hands twisted up in her apron, her dear familiar face crumpled in grief.

Two miles from the farm we passed my stepmother in the lane. She stepped off the path into the ditch to let the wagon by and as it rattled past, she looked up just in time to see me. As our eyes met, her whole face collapsed, and I knew then that she hadn’t meant for them to find me.

There was a long wooden table in the room where they took me. There was a set of thick leather straps, and a young surgeon and an old one. I knew right away that it was no good to struggle, but I couldn’t make myself be still. I bucked against the straps and bit the hand that tried to gag me, and all the while I knew nothing would stop what they were going to do.

Farm children get hurt. I broke an arm the spring our father remarried, thrown by a mule. Any number of cuts and bruises had speckled my limbs, sprains had slowed my steps. This was worse—not because the wounds were deeper but because I saw the faces of the surgeons as they worked. They looked at me as though it was nothing, what they were doing, like I was meat.

It was cold in that room, but every place the knife touched was a bloom of heat and I thought it would never be over, that they would go on opening up my flesh until there was nothing left of me. The surgeons didn’t bother to explain. They never spoke to me at all, talking over my head to each other. They kept me on the table for hours.

I was shaking, snot and tears still streaking down my face, by the time they brought me to the tower. As soon as the soldiers heaved the heavy door shut, the others surrounded me, clucking over my cuts, welcoming me in three languages, only two of which I knew. They were scarred too: the whole side of the oldest woman’s face was a pit the shape of a scooped-out squash, sunken and curled. In the center of it I could see a tiny seed, just beginning to grow again. The worst to look at was a boy, Jack, just ten years old, who could grow only one—a perfect, luminous sphere, right at the base of his throat. The skin was stretched so thin I could see his pulse beat against the unyielding jewel.

Jack crept up to me that night as I sat on the edge of my bed trying to think how I’d ever get to sleep without hearing my sister chattering away on the other side of the room.

“You must help me,” Jack said, in a strained, hushed voice, and he took my hand.

“Help how?”

“Take it out.” He curled my palm around his throat, trying to press my fingers into his flesh, his small, sharp face staring up at me with unbearable hopefulness until one of the young men drew him away gently. I kept waking that night in the too-soft bed, thinking I felt his pulse stuttering against my fingertips.

At breakfast the next morning I noticed that they didn’t even give us knives for our meat: it was served cut into thin slices, tender enough to be eaten with a fork. At home, meat had been feast day food, prepared with the utmost care, served with reverence. Here it was heaped up in a pile, more than I could chew, and all I could do was stare down at the useless bounty on my plate. The other growers took turns nudging me into eating all that first week when the grief seemed to lock my jaws closed, filling my cup, talking to me gently even when I couldn’t reply.

There were twelve of us trapped there in the tower, eleven pearl growers culled from all over the Duke’s lands, and one woman, Esti, who’d been found by the guards as she crossed the countryside on the way back to her own county.

“My home is far from here, so far that the Duke cannot touch it,” Esti told me, and I liked to think of that, a place beyond his reach, even if I didn’t quite believe it existed. Esti was the angriest of us and the brightest. She was always where my eyes went when they were not busy. Of course, they didn’t have us lounging about between the too- rich meals and trips down those dark stairs to the surgeons’ rooms below. There was not an animal in the Duke’s green fields that didn’t have a duty, and ours were all to do with soft things: wool that had been carded for us already, linen that had been cut and needed hemming. We had no scissors, only needles, so I learned the tastes of the dyes as I learned the patterns, gnawing the thread in two with my eyeteeth. I wondered who would sleep on the cloth, who would wear it next to their skin with the mark of my mouth still on it. When Esti praised my needlework, told me my stitches were small enough to satisfy the fairies, it was the first time I’d smiled since I left home.

The other growers’ stories came out slowly—a memory here, a joke there, as we bent over our unending needlework. I learned which questions I could ask, the light ones that would float our talk for the afternoon and those that dragged us down into grim silence. We did what we could for one another—they taught me that right away. Lily, the oldest woman, saw the way I flinched away from the rip in my sleeve, remembering every time I saw it how my sister had screamed when the guards tore my dress. She helped me mend it so perfectly I could barely see the seam. When I was restless, Ander showed me the place at the window from which, if you stood on a stool, you could just see over the keep’s grey walls to a long line of distant, golden fields. I held onto Ander’s steady shoulder, up on my tiptoes so long my calves cramped, and he didn’t say a word about my tears when I finally stepped down.

No one ever had to cross the hall alone when the guards summoned them. That was the worst bit, somehow, just before the pain started, just before they looked at every part of you, bare to that damp, cold air and decided what they would take next. Someone—whoever was closest—would spring up to walk with you as far they could, even if it was only a few steps. Lily was the first to do it for me, her big rough hand closing on my forearm so tightly I could still feel it there as they took me down the stairs.

Whenever the surgeons were finally finished, when I stumbled back up to our prison, someone was always waiting for me, ready to call my name, call me back from that dark room. Without their patient voices, I would have been cut out of myself completely.

Every night Jack asked. “Take it out,” he begged us, one after another, as though we had anything to cut him with, as though the Duke would have let us live an hour after removing such a treasure. It stuck in my throat to tell him no. I hated to watch his face crumble every time I refused, so I tried to distract him, teach him the games my sister and I used to play. But Jack couldn’t laugh the way other children did—the weight of the growing gem crushed the sound out of his throat.

They cut five pearls out of my body that first month, all white and gleaming. I thought the way the pearls grew was chance, the way a fruit will sometimes go gnarled and strange, take up the flavor of a sister tree. The root was unknown, it seemed, surging up out of one woman’s flesh but never appearing under her sister’s skin. But they only grow where a wound is, only swell where the body has learned pain. In the first few days, they cut me in precise, methodical crosshatches while I learned to bear it. Then they went deeper, on the chest, the thigh, where the shining growths swelled the largest. That month the smallest pearl was about the size of a spring pea, the largest as big and round as my thumbnail. I thought them a fortune, an astonishing treasure, and for a moment I was almost proud. But the sharp-eyed woman standing over the tray where the surgeons dropped them, still wet, was displeased.

“Not what they could be,” she informed them. “We’ll have to try the other methods.”

I felt a hot rush of humiliation at having made something still lacking, even after all that pain. That’s when I finally understood that it wasn’t the jewels alone that the Duke wanted. Left alone, I grew twists of moonlight, no two alike. But he wanted only repetition, one shining orb mirroring another and another, surging up out of our bodies. Matched sets were preferred, but could be disregarded in the name of a singular perfection, like Jack’s pearl.

“Save your strength for the table,” Lily told me, when she saw the way the guards had to drag me down the stairs. She was right. When the leather straps touched my wrists, I wanted to wail with fear, but I learned. I learned it was better to walk down the stairs instead of being dragged. I learned to grit my teeth until I thought they would crack. By the end of the third month, they didn’t have to put the restraints on me until right before the knives came out.

Every day Jack’s breath scraped against his throat a little louder, his eyes became a little duller. Esti and I sat with him in the evenings after he lost the strength to play at all. I tried to keep my eyes away from the obscene bulge of the heavy jewel while I told him the stories I could remember my mother telling us, the oldest, sweetest ones I knew. But it was Esti who could calm him when she sang.

“Did your parents sing to you?” I asked him, when Esti’s voice finally wore out. But he shrugged feebly against the pillow, as though he didn’t quite understand the question.

“Jack’s been here too long,” Esti whispered. “He doesn’t remember before.”

The horror of it gripped me—to know nothing but this room and the splinters of sky he could see through the arrow-slit windows, nothing but the surgeon’s impersonal hands pressing him down to the table.

“Surely they will cut it out tomorrow,” I said to her once Jack fell asleep, his throat pushing against the agonizing weight of the treasure under his skin, but I said it again the next night and the next.

Then eventually, one day, he did not come back from the surgeons. His bed was still scattered with the pathetic toys we’d all pieced together to amuse him. My eyes burned when I looked at them but I couldn’t bear to throw them away, none of us could. So we left them there, as though we were all pretending he would come back up the stairs any minute now, calling for us in his strained, rasping voice.

The Duke was courting, they said. He wanted to give the lady in question a rope of pearls that would touch the toes of her slippers, but each one must be a sister to the next. Esti and I were the most alike in what we grew already so they began to cut us in the same fashion, the same places, trying to force the pearls into uniformity. It was worse to be taken down to the surgeon’s rooms with her than it was to go alone, worse to watch the way her face twisted in pain as we climbed the stairs back up to our prison. Esti held my hand the entire way, or I held hers. I can’t remember who reached out first, just the feeling of our palms coming together like two halves of an oyster’s shell.

I couldn’t see where they had cut me. I thought I would go mad not knowing what was growing under my skin, where the scars would pull and pucker.

“Here,” Esti said, and she pulled the soft material of her dress down. The sun was setting somewhere out in the world I felt half-convinced had already forgotten me. In these sorry rooms, the light poured through the window to lay across her skin and the inside of my chest was a bell tower that rang so loudly I put my hand up to quiet it.

The pearls were already scattering across her shoulder blades, growing thicker as they followed the ladder of her spine, all the way down to the curve of her waist, a mirror of my own. “Just like yours,” Esti said, looking over her shoulder at me. I knew she was right, I could feel them growing, but it didn’t seem possible. Where I felt torn, hollowed, she seemed to bloom. Esti must have read it in my face, because she said it again, “Just like yours.”

We all knew the Duke only cared for the fruits of his harvest, leaving the seeding and tending in the careful hands of his surgeons. He appeared only occasionally, driving them to greater speeds and brighter gems, so when the would-be bridegroom grew impatient enough to come himself, arriving unexpectedly one day while the surgeons were already at work, he sent the whole place into a frantic scramble. I heard the uproar before I knew what had caused it, servants clattering up and down the hallways below, a guard coming to collect Esti and me for the Duke’s inspection, their anxiety to please him rolling off the whole place like an odor.

The Duke was standing by the hearth when the guard brought us in. I meant to examine his face again. On the few occasions I had seen him, I had searched for something there that I could understand, the tiniest scrap of remorse, the faintest flicker of pity. But this time, I never got as far as his face. Around his neck was a rope of gold and hanging from it was something I recognized: Jack’s pearl, enormous and absurdly luminous, like wearing the moon around your neck. When the Duke leaned in to look more closely at the bulging growths along Esti’s shoulders, I saw something streaked across it: not an imperfection in the jewel itself, but a stain, a thick smear of oil. Something clawed and furious began climbing its way up out of my chest—the shriek of anger I’d been holding in since Jack died under the surgeons’ knives.

The Duke said something but I didn’t hear; I was thinking of Jack’s crushed throat. I was thinking of all of us up there in the tower, barricaded in the dark, tearing unspeakable treasures out of our own flesh for him to wrap around his neck. And he didn’t even bother to keep it clean.

There was a wail from the next room where the surgeons were at work—a voice so shredded with pain that I never would have known it was Ander if I hadn’t seen him being taken away before Esti and I were summoned. I shuddered and Esti swayed, as though the sound had pierced her. But the Duke only looked bored.

“I haven’t time to stand around all day in this hole,” he told his guard. “I don’t care if they’re in the middle of it, go and fetch the surgeons.”

I’d never seen the Duke alone before, not a single guard at his side, and the shock of it kept me still for a long moment. We were close to the fire. The poker was there, next to my empty hand, and then, in an instant, I was holding it. My feet moved before I could think, gliding silently across the floor. I looped that golden chain tight around my fist and jerked the Duke down to his knees in front of me. He didn’t even have the sense to look frightened, only vaguely annoyed, like a shirt had torn, like the wheel of his carriage had splintered. He opened his mouth to speak just as I brought the iron poker down. I struck his temple, knocking him backward. Then I swung it at his face again and again, until his heels stopped kicking against the floorboards.

When he was finally still, a wave of awful satisfaction swept over me. The bitter, choking helplessness I’d felt since the day I was taken streamed out of me, leaving me almost drunk with relief. No matter what happened next, the Duke would never again wear what we had grown. I leaned down and pulled the chain over his ruined skull. I didn’t want him to keep Jack’s pearl, even if he was dead.

Esti was next to me. She was shaking, and I put my hand out for her before I saw it was streaked with blood, but she didn’t flinch away from me. Her fingers clasped mine just as though I were still clean, and the golden chain caught between our palms. I was cold all over, as cold as I’d ever felt under the surgeon’s knives, except for a swelling knot of sickly, burning fear that twisted in my chest as I looked down at the Duke’s body.

“They will kill me,” I told her.

“They will not,” she said, and I loved her for the lie.

“I’ll tell them you tried to stop me,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of, the only way to keep her safe.

The poker was still in my hand, something wet and soft clinging to the blunt tip. Esti took it from me and she began to scrape burning coals out of the hearth, scattering them over the floor, sending bright streaks of sparks flying across the room. They caught and bit into whatever they touched, curls of smoke rising around us.

“The Duke hit his head,” Esti told me, and suddenly I understood. Esti plunged the poker back into the flames, burning away what I had done before anyone could see it. Then we shoved together, heaving the body across the floor until the Duke’s shattered temple touched the sooty andiron.

I slipped Jack’s pearl into the pocket of my dress and turned to pound on the door. “Help,” I screamed. “The Duke’s hurt, he fell into the fire!”

I couldn’t breathe. The terror scraped upward out of my lungs, pushing so hard against my throat I had to cover my own mouth as the guards pushed past us. I waited for them to whip around and call me a murderer, but they didn’t even look at me. The first guards into the room shouted when they saw the Duke lying on the hearth, fat orange sparks peeling his hair away with a series of sizzling, foul-smelling pops. They seized his ankles to drag him clear of the flames, shrieking for the surgeons, the other guards, anyone to help. The rest of their company piled into the room, frantically waving their coats and tossing basins of water at the walls. The flames were crawling across the floor, snapping at the cases of the surgeon’s tools, gobbling their way up the sides of the curtains until they reached the long wooden beams of the ceiling.

“Go,” Esti kept whispering, “Let’s go now, go!” I felt as though my feet were made of lead but with Esti’s voice in my ear, I pushed into the confused mass of men at the door, shoving our way through the crowd until a sudden rush of clean, cold air poured into my lungs.

No one called out to stop us. No one seized me, howling accusations.

There was time for only one uncertain breath of relief. Then I heard the pearl growers’ voices from above, shrill and pleading, the sound of fists beating against a heavy locked door as the plumes of black smoke billowed up the walls, pouring into our chamber.

“They can’t get out!” I grabbed for the sleeve of one of the passing guards, but he shook me off without a glance. “The door is locked, the other growers can’t get out!”

None of them listened, one guard after another shoving past us until Esti finally caught the lieutenant rounding the corner.

“The Duke will be furious if you let his pearl growers burn,” Esti yelled over the growing noise, gesturing wildly upward. “Do you want him to know you were responsible for losing them all?”

Pity wasn’t enough to move them, but fear of the Duke’s anger forced the guards into panicked action, frantically scrambling until someone finally managed to produce the key. Esti and I waited in the smoky chaos of the courtyard, calling out for the other growers as they staggered out of the doorway one at a time until we were all bunched together, soot-stained and coughing.

“Now’s our only chance,” I said, gripped with sudden certainty, and I saw the words repeated, Esti whispering it to Ander, Ander telling it to Lily, the message leaping from one grower to another until we were suddenly all moving together, shoving our way through the crowd. A pair of servants stopped us at the courtyard’s iron gate, trying to wave us back behind the walls. My stomach dropped all the way to my feet. But Lily drew herself up to her full height, the flickering light casting a shadow on her caved-in cheek.

“The surgeons instructed us to wait by the well,” she said. And then, after the slightest hesitation, “They don’t want the pearls to be harmed by the heat.”

They believed her long enough.

When I glanced back, I saw columns of smoke shuddering out of the slitted windows and a furious red glow rising on the uppermost floors where our beds had been. Just as we reached the outer wall, something inside the tower gave way with a crack so loud it shook the ground and someone inside shrieked.

I kept expecting to hear the thundering of hooves behind us once we reached the road, but the fire must have spread so quickly they couldn’t spare a thought for lost treasure. At the very first crossroads we had to part ways, knowing our chances of crossing the border unseen were better if we separated. Breathless and smeared with ash, we parted too fast to feel the sting of it. I wanted more than anything to just go home, even though I knew I didn’t have a home anymore. Not after what my stepmother had done.

But Esti kept hold of my hand, drew me along with her as though we’d long ago decided to travel on together. We kept to the empty roads at night and slept in hedgerows and haystacks by day as Esti led me farther and farther west, crossing one border and then another. We walked until the trees began to change around us, until I stopped recognizing the birdcalls. I kissed her for the first time when she stole us a huge wheel of cheese, both of us starving and laughing as we shoveled it into our mouths.

Her family had never stopped hoping that Esti would come home and they were so kind I almost felt they’d been waiting for me too. We sent for my sister last month. Esti says to be patient, that it takes a long time for letters to arrive and longer still to uproot yourself. But I know my sister. She will have left as soon as she heard where I was. She’ll be following the same roads Esti and I took, crossing the same borders. Every day, my wife draws the map of our journey for me—in the flour on the breadboard, in the chicken feed. Together we count the miles, and I tell my love: today my sister might be in that village with the apple trees, and tomorrow she could cross the bridge, if she is making good time.

Esti keeps her pearls in a box on the mantel, a jumble of bright petals. But I scatter mine on the windowsills, just to see them in sunlight. I’ll want to make something with them eventually. But I have time. The pearls come on their own now. Fewer and stranger without the knives, never a perfect sphere among them. When the right day comes, they slip out so easily. They fall right into our hands.