Movement Three — What Wasn't Beautiful

I won't tell you much more than that about what the place looked like. I don't think it deserves more than that, and I don't think you need more than that either, to understand the shape of where I was.

What I can tell you, instead, is what it sounded like, because sound, unlike sight, arrived at me from every direction at once and didn't require anything of my swimming, half-focused eyes to reach me. There was the low, constant murmur of men praying, or trying to, half-formed words falling apart before they reached whatever they were aimed at. There was weeping — not loud, not dramatic, but the quiet, exhausted kind, the sound of people who had been weeping for long enough that their bodies had settled into it the way you settle into a familiar chair, no longer expecting the weeping itself to change anything, simply continuing because stopping felt like agreeing to something worse. There was the occasional metallic drag of a chain against stone, someone shifting their weight, someone testing, uselessly, whether their own bonds might have loosened in the night.

And there was the smell. I want to spend a moment on the smell, because I think it told me more about where I was than anything my eyes managed to offer. It was thick, and it did not behave the way a single smell behaves — it arrived in layers, the way sound had arrived in layers, and once I'd started separating them I found I couldn't stop. Iron, first, sharp and unmistakable even to a nose that had never before had reason to learn what iron smelled like when it wasn't shaped into a tool. Something sweeter beneath that, cloying, the specific rot of things that had stopped being alive some hours or days before and had not yet been given the mercy of being buried. Earth, damp and old, the smell of ground that had absorbed more than ground was ever meant to absorb and had simply gone on being ground anyway, patient in the specific unthinking way only earth can afford to be patient.

I noticed, distantly, that my own skin carried a version of that same iron smell, and understood, with the same flat, unhurried acceptance I'd apparently brought with me into this body, that some of it was almost certainly mine.

There was heat, too, though not the kind I would have expected from a place that sounded and smelled the way this one did. It came from somewhere behind me, low and steady, the particular dry warmth of a fire being kept alive for some practical purpose rather than for comfort — cauterizing, I would learn later, though I didn't have the word for it yet, only the smell of scorched cloth carried occasionally on whatever thin wind found its way through that place. Beneath my knees, the ground held a cold that had settled in deep, the specific chill of earth that hadn't seen full sun in longer than it should have, packed hard by however many other knees had pressed into it before mine, and I found myself, absurdly, cataloguing the texture of it the way I might once have catalogued soil before growing into it — coarse in places, worn almost smooth in others, the ground itself keeping its own quiet record of everyone who had knelt there before me.

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The chains at my wrists had their own particular voice, if you'll allow me that indulgence. A low, dull clink whenever I shifted my weight even slightly, metal against metal, answered a beat later by whichever chain sat nearest mine down the line, so that the whole kneeling row of us seemed to speak to each other in that single flat language whether any of us wanted to or not. I noticed, too, the smaller sounds beneath the larger ones — breath, mostly, ragged and shallow up and down the line, punctuated here and there by something closer to a whimper than a word, the kind of sound a person makes when they've run out of language and have nothing left to offer the moment except the noise their body is still willing to make on its own.

Somewhere further off, I could hear water — not close enough to see, had my eyes been of any use to me yet, but close enough to make out the particular unhurried sound of a stream moving over stones, entirely indifferent to everything happening within earshot of it. I found that sound strange to hold onto, stranger almost than anything else in that place, because it was the one thing in that whole gray, iron-scented morning that hadn't yet learned to be afraid. It simply kept moving, the way it must have moved the morning before, and the morning before that, and would go on moving, I understood distantly, the morning after whatever was about to happen to the rest of us had already finished happening.

I am a plant. I want to keep saying that, not because I think you'll forget it, but because I think it's the only honest frame I have to offer you for what came next — the particular, quiet stillness with which I took all of this in, the specific absence of panic that I suspect any properly mortal soul, waking into the same circumstances, would have been entitled to. I did not think, even once, about how I had come to be there. I did not wonder, with any real urgency, whose bodies surrounded me, or whether the body I currently sat inside had ever, before that morning, belonged to someone else entirely. A plant does not spend its strength on questions like that. A plant simply notices the soil it has been placed in, and grows, or doesn't, according to what that soil is willing to give it. I had been placed here. That was the whole of what I understood, and for a little while, kneeling on ground that wasn't mine, in a body I wasn't certain was mine either, it was enough of an understanding to live inside.