‘Oh, don’t mind about the knife. You should have some small weapon with you. In these vicious and violent times it won’t be taken amiss. Ini has more of them than she needs. One less from her collection is one more bit of trouble I don’t have to worry about her getting into.’
‘Oh, no, Madame – ’ Pryn took the weapon and immediately felt uncomfortable holding it. ‘It’s just that the Liberator isn’t in his …’ She stopped. Her meager knowledge – her tiny bit of power – seemed too precious to squander here. ‘Madame Keyne, if you want me to ask the Liberator your question, you must return me to the middle of the city, at the mouth of the Bridge of Lost Desire. From there I’ll be able to find my way to – ’
‘My dear girl, if that’s what I must do to have an answer, then I shall do without! Here we have been talking of responsibility, and you would have me turn you out into the same dangers from which I plucked you? No!’
‘But Madame Keyne – ’
‘You’ve come near getting killed once since you’ve been in my charge. I am not about to repeat the possibility. You will do it my way, or you will not do it! I want no more protests, girl. As I told you already, and as Jade herself suspects, the answer is simply not that important!’
They sat together in the small, open-roofed chamber. On the counters about them lay clay tablets, shells with styli sticking from them, chisels, brushes. Reeds in bunches soaked in shallow trays of alum water. Rubbed and unrubbed parchment lay piled about, held down from the breeze by small pumice blocks. Against the wall leaned boards covered with yellow wax, boards covered with pink wax, tablet molds, piles of clay tokens, blocks of ink.
The little tripod had not yet been lighted.
‘I thought, because we didn’t get much work done today, you might like to eat in here.’ Jade replaced a flower, fallen to the white cloth, in its vase. ‘We might work later. Here. Together.’
‘Yes.’ Madame Keyne reached into the basket and pulled loose the red scarf tucked about the wicker. ‘A useful idea. A pleasant idea!’
‘Here, let me do that for you!’ Jade took the scarf end from Madame Keyne’s hand and pulled it loose – from large, succulent fruits. ‘And let me see, now. Yes. Gya has given us some of her wonderful small loaves!’ Jade pulled loose a second scarf from a second basket. ‘I asked her to make them when I was dithering about this afternoon. I know how much you like them – Oh, Rylla, I’m afraid I got no work done today!’
‘You asked cook … ? Thank you, Jade! I certainly didn’t do very much work myself. Though I suppose I did get into town and review the construction, earlier on this morning. I have been putting that off for so long. Now I don’t have to think about that for another three days.’
Jade touched a third scarf over a third basket, this one somewhat spotted. It came half away from a cut of meat, gray and rose. Jade paused. ‘You worked today. I did not. Somehow, everything you say indicts me. There is nothing I can do for you that means anything … !’
Madame Keyne was silent a moment. Then she reached out and put her hand on top of Jade’s. ‘I would have nothing meaningful in my life if I did not have you and all that you do for me, all that you are to me.’
Their joined hands pulled away the scarf. Jade had washed the clay from her fingers. Only a bit clung about her nails. ‘Sometimes, Rylla – ’ Jade held Madame Keyne’s hand more firmly, then more gently – ‘you are very cruel.’
‘Because I love you?’
‘Because when I become resentful, become confused, when I become frightened and lash out, at you, at myself, at everyone, you do not stop me.’ Looking down, she withdrew her fingers to the white cloth’s edge.
‘How could I … ?’ Madame Keyne looked bewildered.
‘You could say, in the middle of it, or before it even began, at any point …’ Jade looked away from the table. ‘Oh, it is hard to say! I cannot say it. It would be easier to write it – ! You could say – ’ She blinked at Madame Keyne – ‘ “Jade, I love you.” ’ Shaking her head, the secretary suddenly, quietly smiled. ‘Is it so surprising that when I am at my least lovable that is when I most need to know your love? If only I could hear that from you during those terrible times, then I could become myself again.’
‘You have said that before. Yet it always surprises me.’
‘You have acted on it before. If you never had, I could not have stayed in this confining garden. And yet, because from time to time you withhold it, it is hard for me not to feel that – from time to time – my humiliation is something you inflict on me, you create in me, you exploit for purposes that are beyond me to understand – ’
‘Oh, Jade!’ Madame Keyne leaned forward and took both her secretary’s hands, drawing them across the table top. A bracelet clinked against the vase. ‘No …’ (The replaced flower fell again to the cloth-covered table.) The women leaned forward from their backless stools, it is hard for me, Jade, in a circle of my own servants, with Ini there, with that girl, Pryn, simply to say such things – ’
‘It is hard for you, with me rolling and screaming in the dirt, to feel such things – ’
‘No …’ Madame Keyne sat back. ‘No, I feel them. It is only as I said.’
‘Yet that is still what I hear when you say it.’
‘And because I know that is how you read it, I must take the responsibility for it as though I had actually marked it on vellum myself.’ There was something of questioning, something of dismay in Madame Keyne’s inflection. But who could say what the proportions were?
‘You could have stopped me,’ Jade repeated.
‘You stopped the Ini. That was the important thing. As for the rest …’ Madame Keyne shrugged. Then she shook her head. ‘My poor, my dear, my most radiant Jade. You have your bad habits. I have mine. And there are, alas, some things it is simply – and habitually – hard for me to do, in public.’
‘Public? But we are all within your garden walls! You have brought us all here – the servants, even the Ini, even that girl. What public is that?’
‘I have allowed each of you to come, for your own reasons – and mine. To each, I have my responsibilities, which again involve my reasons with theirs – and yours. Were I some crazed aristocrat, living a neighborhood away, I might read into such a situation some absolute power to influence all about me unto life and death. But I’m not, and I can’t. Oh, certainly I can abuse the power I have. If a servant’s face or gait displease me, I may say, “Your work is performed not quite to the style that I desire,” and dismiss him. If some house girl’s manners or politics are too unsettling or too loud, I might – depending on her gait and face – say much the same. But the nameless gods have decreed that there will be enough young women both comely, intelligent, and poor so that the rich and powerful can exploit desire in the name of labor – the rich who can read and decipher desire’s complex signs – in such a way that power here will reproduce itself there, and we may learn from those paupers at once beautiful and egregious – ’
‘But it’s true, Rylla! You are always in public – even within your own gardens: you are always prepared for some fancied spy to observe you from the bushes, overhear you from the eaves.’
‘And you, Jade, are always in private, terrified lest someone see you, someone judge you, someone condemn you; and your better nature is paralyzed under expectation of that perpetual gaze, that eternal acuteness that is everywhere about to break in on your privacy and fill it with anxiety. Only when you feel shored up against all such eyes and ears can your better nature speak.’
‘But because you are always within the publicity of your servants, your employees, your acquaintances, your friends, and – yes – your lover, you are condemned to have no better nature. I know that you are a very lonely woman, Rylla. And your loneliness is not what I love about you – it is too much like mine. I think what I love is the illusion of an inner privacy that might, somehow, be made public …’
When Jade was silent a while, Madame Keyne said: ‘When your
illusions collapse – or when mine do – then we both need to hear, “I love you,” from the other. No, it is not so much to ask: that we speak our truest thought clearly.’
Jade smiled again. ‘Do you remember, Rylla, when you took me on that business trip to the south?’
‘Ah!’ Madame Keyne rocked back on her stool. Coming forward, she seized her secretary’s hands again with a desperate eagerness. ‘How could I forget!’
In her own eagerness, Jade pulled one hand away to gesture. ‘Remember, we stopped at that inn where that bandit gang had also taken rooms for the night?’
‘I thought they were slavers, or only young smugglers – and there were no more than three! – who had sold off their wares and thought it would look more respectable to appear as honest highwaymen!’ Madame Keyne laughed.
‘I was so terrified! And they had the room right beside ours, with the thinnest wall between. They drank so loudly and made so much noise! I was afraid to speak, even in a whisper, for fear we should be overheard – ’
‘Ah, yes!’ Madame Keyne sat back. ‘But we had our business that had to be gone over that night. So I took a waxed writing board and scratched you a note – ’
‘ – and, trembling, I scratched one back to you.’ Jade smiled. ‘I was sure they would hear the stylus in the wax itself and be able to know just from the sound what we exchanged between us!’
‘Exactly what you wrote me! I was quite surprised.’
‘And you wrote back: “I love you more than life and wealth and they will never know of it. “ Or was it “wealth and life” – ?’
‘I think it was “breath and wealth.” Or was it “light and breath” – ? No matter; it was the right matter for the time!’
‘It was the right matter to calm my fear – enough so I could tell you of my terror.’
‘My wonderful Jade – you used to be terrified of so many things, back then. Slavers who were bandits; bandits who might be slavers – ’
‘Yet as we sat on the edge of the bed, passing the board back and forth, concentrating so hard on what we glyphed into its surface, now rolling the scrapings away and sticking them to the board’s bottom, staring at the board in the candlelight without even looking at each other, stopping to thumb out an ill-scribed sign – ’
‘Oh, I always watched you, Jade – at least when I wasn’t writing!’
‘ – yet our questions and answers seemed to go so quickly by and through our business for the night … and moved on to other things, other thoughts, till at last we were writing back and forth of our most intimate feelings, our most intimate fears. It was as if the stylus itself were aimed at just those hidden parts of our souls. It was as though the wax already bore the signs and only waited for us to scratch the excess away to reveal the truth. And all the while, those evil folk in the next room laughed and listened, listened and laughed!’
Laughing, Madame Keyne said: ‘I thought they were too busy laughing to hear a thing! Though it’s true, writing to you across that little gulf that you could not speak over for your reasons and I would not for mine, for all the sinister laughter about us – and bandits, slavers, or smugglers, it was certainly sinister enough! – I have never felt so intimate with another human as I did that night, nor felt I could be more honest, or more – ’
‘Ah!’ Jade threw up a hand. ‘You just cannot admit you are wrong!’
Madame Keyne looked puzzled.
They were not slavers! Or smugglers! They were bandits. And they listened to every word we said, determined to rob us on the least pretext!’
‘Quite probably they were bandits!’ declared Madame Keyne. ‘Most likely I was wrong. Rob us? No doubt they needed no pretext at all!’
‘We were in the south,’ declared Jade. ‘The south is my country, not yours!’
‘We were indeed thirty, almost forty, stades south of Kolhari.’ Madame Keyne shook her head again, again smiling. ‘And the next morning, you made us leave the inn and return to the city – it was too dangerous, you said. So we never did complete our business that trip.’
‘See! You cannot admit you were wrong,’ Jade cried. ‘You must always be right!’
‘It is very easy for me not to be right – most probably I was not right. There is a definite possibility I was – definitely – wrong. There is a definite possibility that the probability was large, huge, overwhelming. Certainly there was no need to take chances. I admit to it all! The only thing I cannot admit to is that … I believe what I don’t believe!’
‘I hate that in you!’
‘I do not love it in you, either!’
Jade looked down. ‘But you went back, two weeks later, and completed what business you had. Alone.’
‘Yes.’ Madame Keyne sighed. ‘I did. Ah, I missed you on that trip. All the bandits and slavers and smugglers seemed to have melted away. And there was no one to sit on the bed’s edge with in the lamplight at evening and write notes to. Without you, it was only dull business.’
‘I do not like to travel,’ Jade said. ‘Business trips, the rushing, the inconvenience, being gawked at by strangers, the small talk with new acquaintances that one will forget ever having known in a week – that is for you. It’s not to my taste. When I come to a new town, a new city, I like to stay in one place for a time, to live there, to meet the street girls and talk to the market vendors, to learn the names of its alleys and avenues; I like to find myself a little garden and walk in it a while. You, Rylla, you run through cities and towns and villages as if they were all suburbs of one great city in which you could never quite find your home. It’s as if you were afraid to hear what your own thoughts might say to you were you to move slowly enough for them to overtake you.’
‘I think it is fear that I might have to read the results of my own actions inscribed on the pliable wax of the world.’ Madame Keyne sighed again.
‘You talk too much and travel too fast,’ Jade said. That’s why you’re so unhappy.’
‘I suppose, when I am unhappy, that is, indeed, the reason. But what was so important on that trip we took together was not the sort of things we say to each other now, but rather what, that night, you wrote to me, what I wrote to you. There, outside my garden walls, I think I felt that what I wrote was, finally and nakedly, private, safe from any spy – ’
‘There, hemmed in by the fear of all I did not know about me, I thought that what I felt was nakedly, totally public, overseen by all eyes, overheard by all ears – ’
‘Yet it was honest. You felt that, didn’t you? That it was honest?’
‘Though I may have been impelled to honesty through fear for my life, yes, it was more honest than I had ever felt I could be with another person.’ Jade smiled. ‘But your writing, Rylla, in the shaping of your signs, is atrocious! There were words I was not even sure of that night!’
‘As you wrote to me. Several times. And I’ve tried to do better.’ Madame Keyne laughed. ‘But that is why I need a secretary. And you suffered to read my messages, and responded with your own, as beautiful as the script in which you scribed them; you struggled to make out whatever, and however clumsily, I meant.’
Jade sighed, i have often wondered if simply because of those frightening men in the next room, you were not just driven, like some slave lashed on by an overseer’s whip, to come closer to your own real thoughts while we wrote to one another that night – ’
‘And I have often wondered if, because writing is so different from speaking, so much slower, so much more considered, if you weren’t forced to consider, slowly, what you really felt – ’
‘Well,’ Jade said, ‘I suppose it’s the same thing – ’
‘ – produces the same results,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘Works the same way.’
‘It was wonderful, certainly! And yet so strange – ’ Jade gave a little shudder. ‘But you are right, Rylla. I feel as though I am at all times observed; and I am paralyzed by those eternally judging eyes – or, when I am not paralyzed, I am frightened to the poin
t of anger, of incoherence, of rage. Often I’ve even felt that it was you who observed me, you who judged me. And then I have been at my worst, certainly. At least to you. But I know, and always have known, finally, that it was not you. You, too, feel you are always observed; but you read in that fancied attention the benevolence, the approval, the applause of the market for the mummers. Your life seems to all about you nothing but success – and without your successes, there would be only failure for me. Often I think it isn’t fair.’
‘You are right,’ Madame Keyne said, it isn’t.’
‘At other times, I only wish I could confront, once and for all, the stranger who is always gazing at me, just out of my line of sight, who is always overhearing what I say and finding it silly or selfish or wrong. If I could truly create such a confrontation, I would be rid of it forever! That I try, so often and so hard, sometimes seems to be the only thing in the world that makes my life worth living.’
‘You are right,’ Madame Keyne said. There is nothing more important than that perpetual and repeated confrontation with the nameless ones. Otherwise one can never become free, can never remain free.’
‘And sometimes I think the difference between you and me is that I have at least tried to engage them directly, that I have at least tried, however frightened I was, to look at them, whereas you have not – not really. You have never listened intently to their breathing just behind your shoulder. You have never turned suddenly to stare one in the face. If you did, if you could see them, truly know that they were there, you would be as terrified as I, and would know your own weakness, know how unhappy you are.’
‘Again, I think you may be right.’
‘No …’ Jade shook her head. Though I love you, I know you do not believe me. Again, because you cannot admit that you are wrong – ’
Somewhere a branch fell, off in the bushes. One or the other of the two women glanced up from the table with vague curiosity. The other went on talking.
Certainly it was no more than a branch.
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