Sarra was an ambitious girl. She wanted the best from life though she was born poor and with a cleft palate. The deformity didn’t affect her looks but it made it hard for her to talk, and she was the butt of many cruel jokes in the village. But she was ambitious, and when she was eight she declared that she would grow up to be headwoman of the village. This meant having a big house, a big family, and a powerful husband. She didn’t find the key to all this until she was fourteen.
That year during the Midsummer Festival she boasted she was as brave as any boy of the village—a rash boast indeed! A couple of them decided to test her. They grabbed her, bound and blindfolded her, took her to Devil’s Rock, and left her there for the night.
Now, some of you around this fire may not know about Devil’s Rock. Oh sure, you may know where it is—way out on the cliffside by this very road, far down in the valley below. And you may know that there’s a little stone altar there. But how many of you have heard that during Sarra’s time there wasn’t just an altar there, there were voices, too?
That’s right, voices, and they weren’t human. They seemed to just sort of slip into your mind.
In those days, when Sarra and I were children (she was my little sister), they were harmless and tolerable to listen to, just a curiosity. Going up to listen to them was like running around Old Emo’s grave in the dead of night on Halloween to see if he’d come out—something you’d do on a double-dare to prove you weren’t scared.
But our grandfather, rest his soul, said that when he was young the voices were different. They were a lot sharper and they left you with headaches after you heard them. He said when he was young he’d heard of a medicine man who came to listen and went crazy.
Anyway, these boys left Sarra there, tied up and blindfolded, lying on the altar. They figured she’d get a good scare and then get loose and run home. At worst they figured one of them could go up in the morning and free her with no harm done, unless somebody else saved them the trouble.
Well, Sarra worked for several minutes to get free and then she heard the voices. She realized where she’d been taken and panicked. Her struggles jammed the ropes tight. After she wore herself out she lay listening in a terrified stillness. She couldn’t understand the voices but slowly her terror wore off as nothing happened.
The next day Sarra was awake when her mother came for her. Sarra was amazingly calm after her ordeal. She didn’t talk much about it and she never tried to get revenge on the village boys. But afterwards she seemed more determined than ever to make herself into a person of significance. Where before she’d spent a lot of time whining about her lot in life now her ambition suddenly had meaningful goals.
The first thing she did was set about improving her speech. She practiced speaking and singing every day, and she always chose to do it at Devil’s Rock.
The results were dramatic. By her fifteenth birthday she was speaking with barely a lisp, and by the time her sixteenth neared she had a beautiful clear voice, both in speaking and singing. My mother said that it was a miracle—Sarra’s palate had mended—my father snorted that was nonsense.
She’d changed in other ways, too. Her visions were the most obvious. She’d never had any before that night. Afterwards she had many; she told people about them and most of them came true. It seemed she was now destined to become a respected fortune-teller.
Other changes were subtler. She became much better at manipulating people, but it was hard to tell what of this skill was just growing up and what was unnatural addition. It was about a year after that night at Devil’s Rock when she first set her sights on Bassa. Bassa was a lanky, quiet young man of the village—such a string bean that he’d have looked better wrapped up in the long robes that old men like me wear, instead of with his bony arms and torso sprouting above a young man’s loincloth. Of course he enjoyed Sarra’s attention when she first started coming to him, offering gifts and asking small favors.
Others may have not found this interest of Sarra in Bassa strange. Others may have seen this as just Sarra and Bassa growing up. But I found it strange … strange and unsettling. I wanted to find out more.