Vergreva, by Mags Carr
It was before dawn, and the sun had not yet knocked the chill off the bones of the city, but the water clock in the forecourt was chiming, and that meant it was time for Grella to get up to make the tea. Most of the guests at the Pools of Delight Resort would not be up for hours, but Grella and the rest of the staff would need to make sure everything was ready when they did. That meant starting the grills and the oven fires, cooking the guests’ morning meal and putting the yeast bread dough to rise for luncheon, sweeping and mopping the hallways and cleaning the public privies, and washing away the vomit and other detritus in the forecourt from guests who had reveled too hard the previous night.
Throwing her tauzak-skin wrapper around her shoulders and snuggling her feet into her fur-lined leather slippers, Grella hauled her body out of the sling bed she shared with her husband and went to stoke the little household stove and put a pot of water on for tea. Outside the kitchen’s high basement window, she could hear drunken singing: two lady guests still celebrating. It was against the rules for her to look out of her window – guests were not supposed to know the staff existed if they were not on duty – but she peeked past the curtain and caught a glimpse of two pairs of bare feet on the paving stones. Her eyes were drawn to the marks left on them from costly, uncomfortable shoes that had been worn for hours, and the dirtied hems of garments that had cost more to purchase than Grella earned in a year, hiked lewdly up to the women’s knees as they danced. She nudged the curtain closed again; it would do her no good to get her blood up this early in the morning.
The tea leaves darkened the water slowly, and Grella warmed her fingers over the stove grate and let her mind wander. It wasn't yet time to prepare for Strka, the holiday week leading up to the winter solstice, but it wouldn't hurt to put the order in early for decorative foliage and garlands. Early was certainly better than late. The closed-off overflow rooms would need to be opened up and aired, in preparation for holiday crowds from the Capitol. Hot springs were a popular place to spend the winter holidays. The temperature never dropped as low in Vergreva as it did in the Capitol, and there was rarely any ice or snow, but wintertime guests still enjoyed drinking their hot falernum toddies beside roaring fires in the grates in their suites, so a large order of firewood would be a good idea. Grella was pretty sure she could get them from the same place as the Strka decorations. She would pay a visit to the greenskeepers today and put the orders in, and perhaps also see her friend who ran the business and have luncheon together.
Grella's husband, Sy, stirred in the bedroom; she could hear him putting his wrapper on, the pained grunt he always gave when he stretched his arm behind him to get it into the sleeve. That shoulder hadn't been the same since he'd dislocated it ten years past. “Is the tea ready, my dear?” he asked, his voice still husky from sleep.
“I was just about to add the butter,” she said, and did so, stirring to let the large lump of white fat melt in. “What do you want for breakfast?”
“A nice plump pigeon and some tender young greens,” Sy said around a yawn. “Perhaps a plate of noodles, as well. You can roll them out by hand. I’ll wait.”
“Porridge it is, then,” Grella chuckled, putting a second pot on the tiny stove. She poured the last of the water into it, and scooped in broken rice and dried peas from the sack on the shelf. “Be so good as to draw us a little more water?”
“Work, work, work,” he pretended to grumble. He gave her a kiss on the side of the neck, scratching her a bit with his snow-flecked beard and mustache, and then took the pitcher out to the pump in the forecourt to refill it. She smiled after him, and added a few shavings off a large lump of golden jaggery to the porridge pot, because she knew he liked it.
Since she was going to the greenskeepers for garlands and firewood, Grella decided she would wear street clothing today instead of her kitchen staff uniform: a privilege of seniority. Assuming today's weather would be like yesterday's, she would wear her green abayeh, which would provide enough coverage for a chilly morning and evening but would not be uncomfortably heavy for what would likely be a sticky afternoon. It was perfectly acceptable for the rich ladies there on holiday to go naked into the hot springs or to ruck their garments up to their knees in the forecourt, but Grella was raised to never let her uncovered body, arms, or legs be seen by anyone but her husband, and her modesty didn't give her the option to bare her skin to cool off. Still, Grella's mother had used to cover her hair and her neck as well, and Grella did not do that – she did not live in the high desert where those who did not shield their skin from the sun could be injured by it.
Sy returned with the clay pitcher of water, and Grella got her first good look at his face. He was breathing rather more deeply than normal, and his golden forehead was shiny with perspiration. Grella hurried to take the pitcher from him, shocked at his appearance. "Your arm is hurting you again," she said.
"I'm just old, my dear," he said, but he was hoarse. He pushed his long dreadlocks back behind his shoulders and sank gratefully into his chair at the board. "Old and decrepit."
Grella made a reproachful face at the words he used to describe himself, but she poured him some tea, making sure it had plenty of melted butter floating on top to strengthen him. He had work today too, cleaning suites, scrubbing floors, and making up beds with his crew of men, but he looked like he could cheerfully go back to bed and sleep until the following morning. Grella pursed her lips. In the sunny islands where Sy was born, it was the lot in life for men, whose arms and backs were strong, to do most of the household work – to chop and haul firewood and tend the hearths, both in the homes and the smokehouses, to butcher the huge fish that the women brought in at the docks and bring the meat home, lug huge bags of salt to preserve the fish, and lift and hang heavy fish fillets over tall frames to smoke and dry, to draw and carry seawater for the evaporation tanks and to draw and carry fresh water for cooking and drinking. He had never wanted that life, and had gladly left it behind. Even so, Grella thought it made him feel bad on some level to be less able to do such tasks due to a sore shoulder that never healed correctly. At the same time, she thought he was unfair to himself. After all, the men where he came from did not also have to scrub floors and make up beds all day.
“I must go to the greenskeepers today at luncheon for the things for Strka,” she said, stirring the porridge. “Will you come along?”
“Not today,” he said. “But tell Leola I would have liked to be there, even though it is not true.”
“You do Leola a disservice.”
“Leola has done me many a disservice. How oft did she tell you I was not good enough when we were courting?”
Grella sighed and rolled her eyes. “Almost every time we spoke of you. But never since we wed! It has been many years, if you recall.”
“Not enough years to spend with you,” he said. “Do give her kind regards from me. They need not be sincere.”
“Very well.” Grella ladled some porridge into Sy’s bowl and set it on the board. She reached up to the overhead shelf and got down his jar of pickled fish, which he liked at breakfast, too. He smiled his thanks to her as she handed him a spoon, and dug in. She served her own bowl and added butter, and joined him at the board. “You won’t work too hard today?” she said, stirring to let the porridge cool and the butter melt. “Let some of the others help you.”
“I will do as little as possible,” he assured her. “My shoulder and I suspect that a rain cloud is coming. The lads will understand.”
“As oft as you’ve covered for them in the past, they had better. Or deal with me.”
“Don’t be so hard on them. The lads and me, we’re a team. We take care of each other. Just like you and me.”
Grella snickered. “Not just like you and me, I wager.”
Sy grinned, showing where one of his front teeth was broken off short. “Not exactly the same. I never tell my crew they are beautiful, nor do I pinch their bottoms.”
“I would hope not!”
“But they do have to smell my pickled fish breath every morning, just like you.”
Grella leaned forward and kissed him. “Your pickled fish breath isn’t so bad,” she said. It was pretty bad, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
When Grella went upstairs for the day’s work, there was a fuss in the kitchen. Her assistant, Coy, erupted from the kitchen doors just as Grella was approaching to investigate the commotion, and stopped short, nearly dropping the tray he was holding. “You’re late today. I was just coming to find you,” he said, breathless. “Lady sent her breakfast back. Didn’t want it.”
Grella looked at the meal as they walked back through the doors into the kitchen: a whole spatchcocked pheasant, with a crackling-hot, crispy skin, speckled with herbs and spices, glistening with grease and rich fragrant juices that would drip down your arm and off your elbow as you raised a carved haunch to take a savory bite, resting on a bed of perfect buttery steamed rice with unbroken grains so long they almost looked like noodles, and an enormous salad of wilted dark greens and ripened black olives with a hot bacon dressing drizzled on top. And, of course, a pitcher of hot buttered falernum wine, redolent of kinamon and mace and lemfruit juice. A feast, for the likes of Grella and the staff. An ordinary breakfast for a guest at the Pools of Delight Resort.
“She sent the whole thing back?” Grella said, knowing it was true.
“Nothing wrong with it, but just didn’t feel like breakfast today,” Coy said. The rest of the kitchen staff were moving in closer, trying to look busy, but finding the conversation very interesting, indeed. “Lady looked a trifle yellow,” Coy continued. “I think she’s in the family way, maybe.”
Or hungover. Grella sighed. “Well, you lot had better eat it then, before it gets cold.” The staff were on it like a pack of hyenas before she had the entire sentence out. She considered reaching for a morsel, herself, but then she saw Coy throw an elbow at the line cook’s ribcage, and reconsidered. After all, she had had porridge for breakfast that day; some members of the kitchen staff would have eaten nothing at all. Their pay was truly dismal. Grella had started out as kitchen staff, herself, back before she met Sy. She shared a room with another woman, and the two of them had pooled their pay for groceries and were still never able to afford much food: a few stalks of cane here, a jug of milk there, a few fistfuls of dried peas or maize meal or rice so broken it was almost flour. When a guest sent a meal back, it was a godsend.
As there would be no getting them to do any work for the next few minutes, Grella made a quick round in the kitchen to look things over. The yeast breads were rising under a damp towel, and the bake-oven fires were roaring. The stew for luncheon was bubbling away on the stovetop, and the dough was mixed up for the noodles it would be spooned over. A small forest of greens had been relieved of their stems, and were soaking in a vat of chilled water to perk them up; they would be served raw, with fresh herbs and a vinegar sauce. Grella checked the level of the cider vinegar in the ceramic jug, and found that it had been topped off. She smiled; Coy would have her out of a job presently. Perhaps he needed it; he had two wives and four children to support at only twenty-four, since his older brother had died of a fever.
However, as his pay was a fraction higher than the rest of the staff – and especially considering the elbow to the line cook’s ribs – she felt little guilt interrupting him in his participation in the feeding frenzy. “Coy, come give me an update.”
“Madam?” He said around a mouthful of pheasant. One of the scouring maids accidentally elbowed a clean-gnawed bone onto the flagged floor.
“Yes, now, Coy. And pick up that bone.”
Coy left the pheasant reluctantly behind. He picked up the bone and chucked it into the nearest bin. “Grilled fish for breakfast tomorrow, Madam,” he began, wiping the grease from his hands on his apron.
“As planned,” she replied, “but I think we’ll do spinach and potatoes in cream instead of dumplings and a salad. It will be less work for you all. Do we have enough mushrooms?”
“Took delivery an hour ago. There weren’t as many this time, but I think they’ll stretch.”
“And the fish?”
“We won’t get them ‘til this aftermete,” Coy said. “I’ll have to stay and wait for them.”
“Nonsense. You were up before dawn today. I will wait for the fish. You go home to your wives and get some rest.”
Coy chuckled. “I’ve got a big family. I forget what rest feels like.”
Grella spent the remainder of the morning making notes about where in the building holiday decorations would go, and how much foliage would be needed to accomplish the extravagant look the resort required. Garlands of evergreen brush and cones and strings of red bitterberries and orange and yellow azitron fruits were typical. Juniper branches would make a fine backdrop. Grella personally thought that ribbons woven of golden silk were too much, which meant they were probably perfect for the resort. The last time she had tried to be tasteful, she had been admonished for making the resort look severe – had almost lost her position, in fact. It was better, she was given to understand, to err on the side of lavish. And what did she care? All she had to do was put in the order. The greenskeeper and the fruit vendor and the silk merchant and everyone else would send her employer a bill, and he would pay it. In some ways, Grella surmised as she readied to go out for her luncheon errands, this made her similar to the rich people who frequented the resort; she was never fully aware of the cost of the ingredients of the meals or the components of any of the resort’s amenities. She, herself, had never bought a chicken, a pheasant, or so much as a pigeon for her own household; nor sifted rice, greens or fiddleheads, or azitron fruits of any color. She suspected the same was true of the wives and mistresses who stayed at the resort, even though they ate them all the time. Luncheon at Leola’s house, on the other hand, was likely to be flat bread with butter and cane syrup, a sliver or two of tauzak jerky, a wedge of paneer cheese, and a cup of chilled whey with a trace of cider vinegar; basic, decent foods that Grella could relate to.
The weather had indeed warmed up, and the air was as humid as always, smelling faintly of sulfur. Sometimes the resort guests complained that the smell was like rotten eggs, but to Grella the smell from the hot springs that permeated the atmosphere in town was pleasant: a clean, mineral smell. The walk through the market street was a gauntlet, but Grella was experienced in navigating it. She raised the hem of her abayeh a fingertip-width to keep it off the paved street, and pulled the folds of it in close to her body to keep vendor children from tugging at it to get her attention, and criminals from picking her pocket. Her iron-gray hair was slicked back into a small, tight knot, so it could not be snagged. As she made a few small purchases on the way to Leola’s she was nearly run down by a rackshaw only twice; not bad considering how many they were, and how reckless.
Sy had pulled a rackshaw for years in Vergreva, running off the soles of his sandals up and down the city streets, pulling rich people who were too drunk or lazy to walk. It was a rackshaw collision, in fact, that had caused his left shoulder to be dislocated, and his front tooth to be broken. He did not seem to be bitter about it, but Grella frequently was.
Leola greeted Grella with a glad cry and a warm embrace. Knowing Leola was the same age as herself, Grella was surprised at how old she looked. Grella thought Leola must be thinking the same, but nevertheless, Leola said, “You haven’t aged a moment!”
“You're a terrible liar,” Grella said, kissing her friend on the cheek. “I came to make the order early for the Strka decorations, and to maybe join you for lunch. I brought you a bottle of milk and a bit of sugar cane.”
“Darling, you didn’t have to do that,” Leola said, striking a flint to light the grill. “I would feed you for free.”
“We all have to take care of each other,” Grella said, setting the groceries on the board. “The tourists aren’t going to take care of us.”
�
��That’s the truth. Here, make up some dough for flat bread while I get this fire going.” Leola pulled a chair out for Grella to sit. “The flour is just there, and the salt, and the whey, and the grease.”
“I can’t do it the way you do it. I have to mix it up in a bowl.”
“Oh, bother!” Leola said, laughing. “I always forget. You start the fire, then.” Leola could mix up the dough on a flat surface with no trouble at all; it was the way they did things where she was from. She worked the flour, salt, and grease together, and scooped and mixed in whey a little at a time to turn it gradually from a mound of powder to a round lump of dough. It took her no more time than it took Grella to light the stove and heat the griddle. As they talked, they worked as a team; Grella rolled out the rounds of dough with a marble roller, and Leola browned it on the hot griddle, turning it expertly with only her hands, as Grella could not have done without blistering her fingertips.
“How is Sy these days?” Leola asked, carefully noncommittal.
“He is old and decrepit, or so he says. His shoulder pains him. But he goes to work every day, and does his job.”
“He is kind to you?” Leola asked, setting another round of flatbread on top of the growing stack; she was making enough for supper, as well.
“Unfailingly. You know I wouldn’t keep a man who was unkind. Sy loves me.”
“A man can love you and be unkind,” Leola murmured.
Grella sighed. Leola had been married in her own country, and had left a man behind who used to hit her. “Darling, my Sy will never be unkind to me as long as I live. It isn’t his way. He’s been my man these nearly forty years; doesn’t it seem as if it would have come out by now?”
“I suppose,” Leola said, tossing Grella a grin. “It does make me wonder if I should have given up so easily.”
“Gods know you had reasons of your own.”
“Indeed I did.” Leola washed her hands and took down some paneer cheese from the shelf next to her. She broke the cheese into wedges with her hands, and gave Grella some hot flatbread. “I have smoked fish, if you want.”
“I will, thanks.” Grella rarely ate fish at all, a fact that frequently appalled Sy, whose childhood diet had been based on fish. However, Leola’s smoked fish were the best Grella had ever tasted. Leola caught the tiny fish in a trap she kept in a hidden place in the reeds at the river, baited with maize meal. She gutted them, salted and sugared them, hung them by the tails threaded on a string over her own household grill, and smoked them using a combination of woods and leaves gleaned from her greenskeeping that she would reveal to no one.
“You should tell someone what you use to smoke those fish,” Grella said, as she had done many times before. “You’re not likely to pass the secret on to your own children, seeing as we’re the same age and my own body stopped keeping track of the moons a decade ago or more.”
Leola brought out a small basket of fish and set it on the board, laying aside the gauzecloth that had been covering it. “So what good would it be telling my secret to you? You haven’t any children, either.”
Grella put her tongue out briefly at Leola and then bit into a fish, crunching the tiny bones between her teeth. She and Leola chatted and ate their luncheon with their fingers, in the tradition of Leola’s land. Grella looked into Leola’s ugly, earnest face with its square jaw and narrow nose, and took in her enormous pale-blue eyes that made her look as ignorant as an infant. That face was deceptive; Leola was sharp as a knife. She ran the greenskeeper’s business virtually all on her own. Like the resort, the business was owned by a rich man who dwelt north of the city and hardly ever came around. She had a crew of men and women who cared for the gardens and trees of most of the nearby businesses that served the tourism industry: inns, restaurants, camping grounds, and even several of the springs, themselves. It had been her idea to turn the waste products from this business to profit, selling cut firewood and decorative foliage in the off-season. The business owner was so grateful that Leola was assured a job until the day she died.
“This is the list of things I’ll need to decorate the resort,” Grella said finally, offering Leola the list.
Leola checked the list. “Juniper might be a problem; there aren’t as many bushes as there once were.”
“So charge a little extra. I’m sure the resort will pay it.”
Leola nodded and made a note on the list with a charcoal stylus. “Will you take some of this flatbread and smoked fish home with you?”
“I will, and thank you. It will make a nice addition to supper tonight. Sy will be pleased. Soon, you will have to visit me for luncheon; I’ll make that porridge you like.”
“That sounds pleasant. I hope I won’t annoy Sy too much.”
Grella laughed. “It will be fine. If Sy is annoyed, he doesn’t have to stay for luncheon.” Grella kissed Leola’s cheek. “We will see each other soon, darling.”
“Pleasant journey home,” Leola said, an ironic cant to her voice.
Grella groaned.
The walk back to work was worse than the walk out to Leola’s; the crowd had gotten a bit denser and the grocery barkers a bit more aggressive as the end of the work day approached. Grella understood, to some extent. Groceries didn’t stay fresh forever. But when they snagged her sleeve or shouted at her, “Oy, Madam, Madam! Look here!” it seemed extreme to her. She was an old woman, and she did not consider it permissible to be disrespectful to the elderly, nor to women.
Of course, Grella had been raised here in Vergreva, where disrespect toward women was not generally considered permissible. Her parents had left behind the high desert, where contempt toward women was the natural order of things. Where women were not permitted to speak to men unless and until spoken to; where men had several wives, sometimes girls so young their bodies didn’t mark the phases of the moon yet; where newborn daughters were occasionally buried alive in the sand by their mothers, rather than be forced to go through life as women. Grella preferred this life to the one she would have led there, and she would be grateful to her parents her whole life for leaving there very soon after her birth, even though she knew it had nothing to do with her, and almost everything to do with the tribal rift.
Swatting the grasping hand of a particularly persistent vendor, Grella quickened her step and approached the resort. She admired the water clock in the forecourt for a moment; it was a work of art in marble and granite, carved before the resort came to be. It depicted the people of the known world, wearing their different styles of garb, with different faces and bodies; even a graceful, winged Man An’Gal of the Floating Isles, several angular, wispy fae folk, and a merman, garlanded with pearl and seashell necklaces, coiled on a rock. All were assembled in a circle around a pool made to look like the region’s largest and most popular hot spring, the weapons typical of their home regions laid down on the ground in front of them. It was a symbol of the city’s history as a neutral gathering place for people from all over the world, where they came together to enjoy the volcanic springs and coexist in peace. The pool was growing full, meaning the noontide was almost at its end; soon the valve would trigger, draining the water away to the river, and the chime would ring the aftermete. She was due back in the kitchen, where preparation of the eventide meal would be underway, and Coy’s fish order would be delivered. There would doubtless be a few fires to put out, but she admired the clock a little longer, anyway.
The idea of Vergreva gave people hope, she knew. The notion that one did not have to accept the accidents of birth; that one could flee, could come to a new place, taking with them those parts of their own culture they appreciated and valued, and leaving behind those that were cruel or outdated, and find work and a home – however poor the home, however hard the work. Certainly Vergreva had its own problems, but Grella had love for it all the same, because of this.
Grella gathered the hem of her abayeh and went toward the back of the building where the kitchen was located. It was time to return to work.
&nbs
p; About Mags Carr
Mags Carr has enjoyed writing speculative fiction and poetry since 1993. She lives in Florida with her husband and their three pet gerbils.
Diversity Is Coming Page 24