Well, it wasn’t a total secret. Wriggler knew, but he’d promised not to gurgle it to anyone else. In fact, he’d helped her by catching balık a-plenty, just for her. Dicle had built little fires and smoked them so she’d have food for the overnight journey to Tuz Gölü. She knew it was wrong to disobey Stag-Face, but ever since her mama had been crushed to death in the cave-in during the shivery months, Dicle had been restless. She was going to go on pilgrimage, whether mean old Stag-Face liked it or not, and when she went, she’d take her mama’s bones to the Mother in the Salt, so Mama could really rest. The Mother in the Salt would be so very pleased she’d change Dicle just how she’d always wanted, and then Dicle would come home and snuggle with Wriggler and everything would be wonderful.
The morning she left, early-early she awoke, after the revelers were all in bed and before even the dawn-time scurriers were out and about. She snuck away at a run, the rucksack she’d stuffed full of Mama’s bones and smoked balık bouncing on her back, the skin full of water slapping her hip. She’d also strapped a gleaming knife to her arm, so the beasties of the wood and the ghouls of the salt flats would see she was one dangerous girl. She bared her teeth as she ran, grr!
The path was made of cracked black stuff, and was smooth from ages and ages of people going to Tuz Gölü and elsewheres. Dicle wasn’t scared, though—at least, not at first. Back during the shivery months, right after Mama had died, she’d gone down the path a fair way before Whee! had caught her and told Stag-Face. Stag-Face had beat her, bad, and Whee! had laughed at her. That, more than anything, was why he’d never-ever be her snuggler.
Everybody, even little, unchanged girlies like Dicle, knew that time and space were the same thing, except when they weren’t. There were a few places around K’pah-doh-K’yah everyone knew to avoid, where, if your eyes worked right—which was no promise!—you could see how the trees grew backwards in time and would gobble you up, if you got too close to them. Stag-Face said those places were holy because, if you looked at them too long, or thought about them too hard while you were there, you’d get a nosebleed and that was the sign of the Mother in the Salt. Also, if an animal or person went there and he or she had a baby inside them, the baby would grow so fast it would tear its way out and make its mama or papa a meat-shell instead of a mama or a papa, and the baby would be a ghoul and never know anything except hunger. That was a bad thing and it happened a few times a year, even if everybody was careful, since time isn’t always the same and, therefore, neither is space.
Dicle ran through a few of those Mother-places the first day of her pilgrimage (She ran as fast as she could, so time didn’t slow down too much for her and make her journey take too long), but she saw more and more of them on the second day, as she drew closer to Tuz Gölü. She knew she was getting closer because all the trees had gone away, and she could taste salt on her lips when she licked them, and she was thirsty. She wasn’t scared, though, because she didn’t have a baby inside her and, if any of the ghouls said boo! to her, she showed them her knife and they slithered away back to their hidey-holes.
Then Dicle crested a hill, as the sun climbed as high as it could in the white-hot sky, and when she looked down into the valley, her eyes started to hurt from too much brightness. Ouch! But that was what Wriggler said would happen, so she knew she was in the right place. Below her stretched endless white: the Tuz Gölü, at last. When she shaded her eyes with her hand, she could see the altar at the edge of the pale lake, sitting a bit back from the shore. It was a rectangular box the size of the meeting-cave, with all these poles jutting from the top, holding up a big empty circle. The rectangular part had lots of holes in the side that Wriggler said weren’t caves but little peep-holes covered in clear stuff that kept the wind out better than woven reeds. That was strange, but Dicle fought her urge to explore. Her business was with the sacred stair and what was at the top of it. She’d show the Mother how dedicated she was by staying focused.
So, Dicle ran toward the altar, her bare feet pounding the earth, every cut or scrape on her body smarting from the salty wind, but as she drew closer, she saw something and stopped so quickly she almost stumble-tumbled—something was crawling out of the Tuz Gölü and nothing was supposed to come out of the Tuz Gölü except the Mother!
For the first time, Dicle felt scared, but she also felt curious. The thing—no, she realised, as she peered slit-eyed and scuttled closer sideways, just like a yengeç—things were not happy, not at all. One was screaming and flailing, and seemed to be missing a leg at the knee, and the other one was dragging the first as fast as it could away from the shore of the Tuz Gölü. As the dragger dragged the screamer farther from the edge of the lake, Dicle saw they were leaving a big, brown blood-smear behind them. But Dicle had seen wounds that bad before and knew just what to do. She ran closer to help them, only to feel more scared and curious than she ever had in her whole life when she realised that the things looked just like her, even though they were obviously long past the time when they should have made their pilgrimage and been changed by the Mother in the Salt.
Still, Dicle remembered her manners.
“Merhaba!” she called, approaching them cautiously.
“Get away from the lake!” shouted the dragger and Dicle understood what she was saying, even though she spoke the words in a funny way. “There’s something in there!”
“Of course there is, silly,” said Dicle. “That’s the Mother! Don’t you know?”
The screamer looked up at her and spat up a big bubble of blood, then went limp in the dragger’s arms. The dragger, who wasn’t dragging anymore, fell to her knees and vomited everywhere. Then she looked up at Dicle. Her mouth hung open, making shapes but no sound, and her eyes were glassy, empty, and bulging. She looked just like a balık! Dicle laughed and unsheathed her glinty knife.
The dragger wiped her mouth. “But we just left yesterday,” she said.
When Dicle’s mama died, Stag-Face had comforted Dicle in her distress and helped her perform the rituals after they’d dug out her meat-shell from underneath the rocks. Dicle was happy to do the same for the dragger.
“Don’t worry!” said Dicle and she patted the dragger on the shoulder, to comfort her in her distress. Then, as was proper, Dicle plunged the knife into the right thigh of the (now quiet) screamer, slicing through skin and flesh. Working quickly, she cut a long strip of meat from his shell.
“What are you doing?” whispered the dragger. “Oh God, oh, God, what are you doing?”
This person must be a stranger if she didn’t know the sorts of things even the littlest babies knew! Dicle decided to be Teacher and help her to understand. Leading by example, Dicle dipped her thumb in the (now quiet) screamer’s cooling blood and drew the insignia of the Mother in the Salt on the dragger’s forehead, then adorned herself the same way.
“The Mother knows our hearts and loves us all, her children,” said Dicle, and then began to gobble up the meat.
Once Dicle had given the stranger some water to rinse out her mouth—she’d vomited again as Dicle gobbled—she’d told Dicle her name was ‘Yıldız’, and forbidden Dicle from cutting the rest of the (now quiet) screamer’s flesh from his bones, even though that was what was supposed to happen.