by Jay Lake
“I shall not tell you to leave. But I am certain you will soon need to return to Copper Downs, regardless of either of our intentions.” She sighed. “You cannot bring them so close to the edge of their own disasters, then walk away.”
“Of course I can. That is not my city.” Even I did not believe that. Inasmuch as I had a city, Copper Downs was it. Or so I understood at the time. In my earliest youth, I had been stolen from a rural backwater, where a settlement of a hundred people would have been considered a vast, brooding metropolis teeming with sin and darkness. As to the only other candidate for my city, I’d been banished formally from Kalimpura, Selistan’s capital and home to the temple of the order that had trained and sheltered me. Otherwise, none of the wretched towns and villages I’d visited on either side of the Storm Sea had any claim on the loyalty of my heart.
“You slew their Duke. By some lights, that makes you responsible for them.”
There was nothing wrong with her command of history, but Ilona’s grasp of politics seemed to be lacking. “I was eleven years old. No one sane would have handed me the throne, then or now.”
“That is not my point, as you well know.” Her grip on my hand tightened. The baby stirred within my belly. She moved so much, for such a small thing. “This is not a matter of ruling, this is a matter of repairing what you have broken.”
I glanced downslope in the direction of the beechwood grove and the bandit graves. “That repair is already beyond the work of a lifetime. And I did not inflict the break, only the final blow to what was already rotted. It took the people of Copper Downs four hundred years to dig the hole they find themselves in now.”
She followed the line of my gaze. “You are no bandit yourself, girl.”
Tugging at Ilona’s hand, which suddenly seemed heavy, I brushed the fingers to my lips. All I wanted was to stay here. To love and be loved. To put away my knives and open up my fists and simply cook and clean and live. Quietly.
“I will not go back,” I whispered, trying to swallow the quaver in my voice.
Ilona squeezed my hand once more. “As you will, Green. You are always welcome here.” She stood, the hem of her dress brushing my thigh. “Tomorrow, will you take some food up to Mistress Danae?”
“She will not be approached by me.”
“Perhaps. In any event, you can leave it at one of the sheltered graves up on Lady Ingard’s Hill.”
“You think it good for me to be among the dead,” I muttered. We had discussed this before.
Ilona smiled and swept into her house.
I sat in the wan moonlight awhile. It had paled Ilona’s skin, rendering her nearly into a ghost. My own fine dusky hue simply darkened until I was almost no one at all. Not Selistani, not of the Stone Coast, of neither divinity nor womankind.
Just a shadow girl hidden in a shadow world. As ever, for me, both then and now.
In time, I stretched upon the bench and took my rest. I couldn’t bring myself to displace Corinthia Anastasia. If Ilona had wanted me in her bed, she would have invited me. Still my hips twitched and rolled as I settled in toward sleep. The scent of rotting apples was my lullaby, the night mists my blanket.
* * *
Morning brought a pale sky almost brittle blue. The early sun lifted my fey mood of the previous evening into the autumn air. I shook off the veils of gloomy anticipation that had settled upon me, stretched my aching limbs, and ventured forth among the frosted golden grass to capture a hare for breakfast. They were numerous enough in the meadows above the neglected apple orchards, and slow with the summer fat they had not yet lost to winter’s coming.
Prowling slowly among the late wildflowers, I realized that Ilona had the right of it. Even if no one had come asking after me, I could not stay here in the High Hills. The declining weather would strike a wound in me as deep as any blade might hope to cut. Even the chill coastal fogs of Copper Downs froze and shrank my soul with little more than a graying damp that numbed the fingers. Snow up here would pile eaves-high on the north side of the cottage. The streams froze for months.
This was no place for a child of the sun.
I touched my belly again. Just a bump, not so much more than an overlarge meal might leave me with. Other women showed far greater than I, six months pregnant. Ilona had said I’d probably carry well nearly to the end. I am not a large woman, and was not even quite to my full height at that time, but she placed much faith in the strength of my frame and the fitness of my body.
“Will you grow here and be happy?” I asked my baby. I didn’t know if I meant the High Hills, Copper Downs, or the world at large. And with Septio dead well before her birth, what would my baby miss about her father? I had been raised by and among women, but Papa had been there first, along with my grandmother.
At that moment two hares emerged from a gorse bush. My chase was on. It is a simple enough affair. You close in sufficiently to overtake them; then, when you judge the moment correct, you break right. A hare will randomly break either right or left, but you cannot outthink an animal with little sense of its own. I always break right. Half the time I have my chance, and I never worry overmuch.
So I ran, scooping up a good-sized rock as I did, watching for the twitch of their stride that meant the escape attempt was coming. I broke right with one of my targets, while the other headed left. Short knife in my off hand, I went for him with a swift toss of the stone. I tripped on something in the grass. Still I caught him, but I lost the blade.
Stunned by my throw, my prey managed to kick, clawing my neck and arms, though I kept my face away until I could break his neck in return. I rose, found my weapon glistening in the damp grass, and paced back a few steps to see what had grasped at me from the earth.
Nothing, in truth. Nothing but my own clumsiness.
I patted my abdomen again. “You do me no favors, little girl,” I told the baby. “I cannot feed or protect either of us if you steal my balance away.”
* * *
Once I had returned to the cottage, I dressed the hare in the work area out back. The pelt I left for Corinthia Anastasia to prepare for tanning. The offal I dumped in the cracked clay pot we kept outside against such uses, for later disposal. The prepared carcass I carried inside to place in Ilona’s smaller iron pot with a goodly portion of well water, some of the previous night’s onions, a very generous pinch of salt, and a pair of gnarled carrots that I shredded. As Ilona still slept, or at least rested, I set about making the day’s bread. My earliest lessons with Mistress Tirelle back at the Pomegranate Court had included cookery, and those memories were among the few that I treasured from the years of my enslavement. Dried rosemary and fresh chopped garlic went into the dough along with the leavening, and I worked it just so. The loaf would not rise and bake in time for the breakfast stew, but we would eat well this afternoon, especially with butter or honey.
As I folded the dough back into the crockery bowl to rise, Ilona’s hands snaked around me. I stiffened and almost pushed her off out of sheer reflex before stopping myself. Fool! She hugged me tight, just below my breasts, before pressing her head against my shoulder.
“Much cannot be,” she said, voice muffled.
“Much can never be,” I replied. The moment spun between us like a dropped wine glass. “This is not to despair.” I grasped her forearm with my left hand and squeezed it. If only she would turn me that we might hug or kiss! Still, I didn’t move for fear of upsetting the mood.
“I worry for your child.”
This feeling I understood. Ilona rarely showed me anything save practical strength, but I also knew how she regarded Corinthia Anastasia with a deep and helpless love. The same maternal aspects that drew me to Ilona were brought out in rare force by the prospect of her own daughter.
My own child … Well, a bastard at the least. Neither fully Selistani nor entirely Stone Coast; not with poor lost Septio’s seed long since quickened inside of me. If only I’d understood then what lay ahead.
Despite a la
ck of invitation, I summoned the nerve to squirm about in Ilona’s arms and take her in the embrace I’d been craving so long. She pressed her body against mine, and we leaned into the kiss, finally.
Then Corinthia Anastasia spilled out of my cupboard bed with a giggle. I broke away from Ilona, my breasts aching, to turn urgently to my bread. A blind man would have known my heat was up from the scent flooding the air.
My would-be lover stroked my hair a moment, before stepping away with a secret smile into her daughter’s needs.
* * *
Ilona frowned. “I think it important that you make an effort to speak with Mistress Danae.”
In truth, I would much rather have spoken with the Dancing Mistress, had she not vanished into the distant country of her kind. Teacher, trainer, friend, sometime lover—I missed her fiercely, especially when I ran through the woods, working my body hard. And I felt little guilt concerning the Dancing Mistress, for everything that had passed between us both good and ill had been wrought equally by the pair of us. Whereas Mistress Danae’s current, broken state was entirely my fault, if not my actual doing.
I had never much minded my dead. Which was fortunate, given their restless numbers. It was the living who had the power to haunt me.
“Yes,” I said, summoning a smile.
The little bundle I would take up onto Lady Ingard’s Hill was nearly complete. The butt of my garlic-rosemary loaf, still hot from the oven, steamed at the top of the pile within. Mistress Danae would quite possibly eat better than I today.
She had been just one of the Factor’s constellation of women, captive to whatever money or penalty or stranger currency of trust the old schemer had used to buy each of them off one by one. She had taught me my letters, and through them much of the history and philosophy of these people who had fathered my child.
I could not imagine spending a lifetime working at the training of unwilling children into pliant women. At my most mercenary, it was obvious to me that teaching anyone to read and think ran directly counter to an expectation of unquestioning obedience. Even beyond the brutal practicalities of educating a hostile student, what of the damage to each teacher’s own soul when they bent an unwilling child to their devices?
As I tied off my bundle, I wondered if I would manage any better with my own daughter. Surely her personality, her needs would run counter to my desires for her. That was the fashion of children everywhere. Whom was I to trust? Whom to believe?
“It must have been difficult, to be Mistress Danae,” said Ilona from behind me.
“Not so difficult as to be the girl under the lash,” I replied with more bitterness than I intended. Ilona had shared my early fate, though her path was different. How could she bear such sympathy for our tormentors?
“You have no idea where she began.” Ilona’s voice was soft but carried a strange edge.
I turned to her, bundle in my hand. “I used to wonder if the training mistresses were failed candidates themselves. But Mistress Tirelle always made such grave threats against me that I could not believe it.”
“You were surely a special case, Green.”
I forced another smile to my face. “Always. But now I must depart, if I wish to be home again prior to sundown. Then I will ready myself to return to Copper Downs before more of those men come finding you up here.”
Ilona leaned forward and kissed my forehead. “That is well enough, dear. You will always be welcome.”
“Save me some bread for tonight, then.”
“Perhaps not that welcome.” Laughing, she saw me off into the day’s weak light. I waved to Corinthia Anastasia, who was weeding in the little garden along the south wall of their cottage. She threw a clod at me by way of response, then bent again to her work.
I headed uphill through the orchards, careful as always not to take the same route twice to minimize any visible trackways.
* * *
Mistress Danae had moved up on to Lady Ingard’s Hill shortly after my arrival at the cottage in the late summer. Ilona reported that she’d been lurking down among the Adamantine Graves before then—all the ridges and upper slopes in this part of the High Hills were dotted with necropoleis—but my presence, even unseen, seemed to have disturbed her.
I’d since watched from a distance as Ilona took food and supplies up to Mistress Danae, and twice had stalked my old teacher for the practice, but the sheer cruelty of that was quickly apparent. She was wounded, frightened, and scarred so deeply that no words or deeds of mine could ever heal her. All I would do was reopen the injuries to her heart and mind. Now, perhaps, I might be wiser and so behave more kindly to my fallen teacher, but I was still very young then.
When I’d brought down the Duke of Copper Downs four years past, all of his powers had unraveled at once, like a storm cloud at dusk. This included the money and spells binding the guards he’d placed on the Factor’s house. I’d been safely away by then, sprinting toward a ship and flight from the erupting chaos in the city. The girls of the other courts and any of their Mistresses who happened to be within the Factor’s bluestone walls were slain by his guards in a rampaging orgy of rape and flame. Of them all, only Mistress Danae had escaped with her life.
The gods had granted her no favor in this.
I wondered if one of the Lily Goddess’ sisters had spared Mistress Danae for some future purpose. Desire, their mother-goddess, watched over women, it was said. Protected was too strong a word, though. Women were so obviously unprotected in this world, unless they stood very close indeed to a divine altar, or ran with the Lily Blades.
Mistress Danae had been protected from nothing, in the end. Not even the elements up here, that I could see, though Ilona said she’d passed the last four winters on these mountaintops. Somehow my former teacher survived. That required more than Ilona’s little packages.
All this on my mind, I climbed the shallow cliff that led to the slopes of Lady Ingard’s Hill. Once long ago a road had wound up this face. Its piers and footings were still somewhat in evidence, though most of the collapsed stonework had long since been hauled off for other purposes elsewhere.
Mistress Danae had climbed this as well. How, I wondered? She had the use of her arms and legs, but the few times I had seen her, the woman had been so visibly confused as to seem trapped senseless within her pain.
I slipped over the crumbling edge into the meadows above. I had no idea who Lady Ingard had been or why this was her hill; my extensive history lessons in the Factor’s house had not once concerned the ancient graves of the High Hills. The usual scattering of turved mounds and little stone death-houses covered this whole area. A squat tower rose near the ridge of the hill, half a mile’s walk upslope from me, like the king on a chessboard.
Ilona had left her gifts for Mistress Danae there before. It was the only real building up here, as most of the graves were either sealed or shattered. The tower stood roofless and doorless so in the winter it would likely be even more miserable than the leeward shelter of one of the mausoleums.
I headed upward in long, ambling switchbacks across the slope. The air was clear and sharp, as if it had abided upon some higher, colder mountain before blessing my lungs. Grasses nodded in the wind. The fat red bees also did their patient work here. I startled up quail, rock doves, and swift little green snakes as I strode among the graves.
As always, those were interesting in their own right. Much like the miniature Smagadine temple I’d noted the day before, these mausoleums, monuments, and cenotaphs constituted a condensed history of architecture and ornamentation of Copper Downs. Several sported tiled domes of a style that were almost certainly imported from Selistan somewhere down the long ages. That lent a flush of pride to my sunstruck southern heart.
Very few of the graves were marked to tell who lay within. This seemed odd to me—most cemeteries I knew of featured little biographies of their inmates, as if knowing the year a baby had died would make the child more real to a passerby of a later generation.
&
nbsp; Markings or not, these graves were decorated in a manner that had clearly once been lavish. Jewels and metal chasings had for the most part vanished uncounted generations past. Carvings remained. Details. Images cast in tile, or painted underneath a sheltering roof. That a person was buried here at all stated “I am wealthy” in the manner of distant Copper Downs long before the rise of the Dukes. These graves dated from the time of Kingdoms, and some from the Years of Brass prior to that, when the mines beneath the city were active and stranger things had walked the streets than did today.
At least for the most part, given that Skinless and Mother Iron inhabited the city now.
Wordless, the graves still offered their tales. This one featured small bat-winged children, like demon messengers, with a hint of torment on each tiny, wind-worn face. That one’s pilasters were bundles of sheaves, wrapped in vines, as if the dead had been overlords of some great swath of farms or vineyards. In this manner, each crypt told its silent story. Some were little more than threadbare memories; others shouted from beyond death’s veil.
The whispers I ignored. I was not here to treat with ghosts. Nothing of my experience with the Factor after his death lent me any desire to pursue their fickle company.
I paused a few dozen yards from the battered tower. Up close, the structure looked as if it might at one time have been besieged. Why anyone would invest a grave site with force of arms was beyond me, but fire scars surrounded the narrow tunnel of the door, while shallow dents in the stonework testified to the impact of projectiles hurled in blunt anger. Nowadays moss and tiny grasses grew in those hollows, a scattering of eye-blue flowers lending them a melancholy air. The top was eroding, only a third of the crenellations remaining. The remainder of the circle of stone dipped like a dancer beneath her partner’s arms.