by Jim Grimsley
He let her wear the ring again and, when he left her alone with the books, late in the day with the rain still falling and thunder booming over the three hills, she was still fingering the simple silver band as she continued to puzzle at the pages. She made little progress with any sort of study other than the language itself—she had rarely been granted access to any of the major Erejhen libraries before, and here was a feast of books published over hundreds of years, in which she could trace the permutations of words and spellings from one century to the next.
The books themselves, as objects, were still strange to her, though she was growing to love their shape and texture. The weight of a volume in the hand or the lap, the smell of paper, old and new, the shape of print and the design of the blocks of type, came to please her over the course of the afternoon. Running her fingertips across the surface of the page, feeling the slight change of texture where the type ran in even columns up and down the page, she found herself approaching the pieces of writing with something like awe. To read the words that others here had written long ago gave her a greater sense than she had possessed before of the history of this place, the depth of it. The fact that she must read in real time made the words more vivid.
Late in the day, she felt a rush of wind in the room and turned to see Irion standing there, a cloud of vapor swirling to nothing around him, a smell of lightning and storm, as if he had stepped into the room out of a cloud. He was elaborately dressed, much more so than she had seen him on the day before, not so much in clothing as in jewels: rings, necklaces, bracelets, a kind of fine mesh chain that clung to each hand, earcups and earrings, a circlet of silver worked with gems on his brow. He glittered as if he himself were a jewel. “Good afternoon,” he said, “I hope I’m coming at a good moment.”
“I didn’t hear you come in,” she said.
He smiled and stepped closer. “Are you making any headway? Did Arvith help you?”
“Yes, he did. The books—” She turned and lay her hands along the cloth cover of one of them, called, as far as she could make out, The Word Turning. “They’re helping me with my study of your language, but that’s about it. I’d need weeks to be able to read well enough to learn very much.”
“In your world, of course, you could make an adjustment that would help you?”
“I’d buy a neural patch, something like that. Something to help me learn faster and something to make sure I retained what I studied.”
He nodded, close enough now to see the silver ring on the table where she had lain it, nestled in a finely crocheted table covering that mimicked a fall of flowered vine. “We use these rings for that purpose,” he said. “This ring is a very simple one, but I could give you a better, if you wish.”
Jedda closed The Word Turning and turned in her chair to face him. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
He smiled. “You’re very cautious. I respect that.”
“I come from a cautious place. A cautious people, maybe that’s a better way to say it.”
“Is it true that all Hormling are careful like you? I haven’t found it to be so.”
“All Hormling, no. People from my city, Nadi, yes. Nearly all, anyway. We make a cult of it.” She hesitated. “Have you traveled in my world a lot? You sound as if you have.”
He smiled and nodded. “Briefly, so far. I’ll travel a good deal more beyond the gate, once it’s permanently open. And I have access to all of that experience, here and now.”
She slipped the ring onto her finger, and waited. He was watching as the change came over her, the feeling of a kind of psychedelic separation of her consciousness from the texture of the present moment. “I can understand that idea a bit better when I’m wearing this,” she said from within the controller, fingering the ring, hearing the oddly echoless distance of her own voice. “But it’s still such an odd notion.”
“For me, too,” he said. “It’s still very new. Until I moved you to this time, I had never taken advantage of the opportunity such a consciousness affords me to interfere.”
“What do you mean?”
He moved to the window, considering. “In the line of time that existed before I brought you here, this storm did not happen, and in fact these days were quite peaceful ones, in which I would have had ample opportunity to speak with you and teach you myself.”
“But your bringing me back has changed events?”
“My bringing you back has caused my adversary to react. To search for you and me.”
“That’s causing the storm?”
“The storm is my own, though it’s part of my response. There are energies in it of which I can make use, violent ones, in the work that I do.”
She could see the change in his manner now, the animation of his features, the nervous tapping of his finger along the sill of the window. He was more alive in some way than the night before, with a look in his eye that made her a little afraid. “Are you in any danger?”
“I will be,” he said, “in your time. And so will you be when you go back.”
“Is there any urgency? Do I need to make up my mind and go?”
He had gone suddenly distant, lit by a cascade of lightning at his back. He paced away from the window, the necklaces and bracelets murmuring. “Only of a kind. Keeping you here in a temporary way is rather like keeping tension in a strong elastic. The storm comes from this work, and feeds it.”
“So you really couldn’t let me stay forever, without a great deal of effort.”
“I could bring you here completely and cut the link, yes. Then to return you to your own time would be much more difficult and I would no longer be able to return you to the moment of your departure. You would vanish from your time altogether and return to it after a vacancy, and not in the same place from which I brought you. As it stands now, as long as I hold this tension, when you return, no one will be the wiser, no one will know you’ve been gone at all.”
She touched the ring, finding it easier to focus on what he was saying from this state of mind, this cloud of herself. “I’ve already decided to go back, anyway,” she said, her voice slurred, as if she were speaking slowly.
She must have looked puzzled at the effect, since he saw her and stepped toward her, touching the ring, gently pulling it from her finger. “You’re not ready to wear it so long,” he said. “Be careful.”
“I had it on for much longer with Arvith.”
“Yes, I’m sure. Without training, your tolerance for the kei decreases; you need to rest from wearing the ring, after you’ve used it for a while. Once you begin to study, you’ll be able to counter this effect in various ways.”
“How could you tell?”
“Your reactions were slowed. You looked a bit drunk.”
She felt herself beginning to return to herself.
“At any rate,” he went on, “I’m in no real hurry to return you as I enjoy your company, even with this slight problem to deal with. So you may go when you choose, however long that be. As I told you last evening.”
The effect of the ring ebbed slowly, as before. She sat quietly till she felt herself no longer divided. “I expect I’d rather go sooner than later.”
“You’ve read enough?”
“Enough to know the books aren’t going to help.”
“But you still wish to be trained?”
She looked him in the eye. He held her gaze without hesitation. She felt herself deciding again that she would trust him. Feeling trust for him, in fact. “Yes. Whatever this is, I want to know more.”
He relaxed almost visibly. When he sat, the weight of necklaces pressed into the layers of his robes. “That’s what’s essential,” he said. “Malin can see to your teaching, in your own time.”
“Malin?”
“Yes.”
“She’s here, you know. I met her.”
He nodded. “So I hoped you would. Where?”
“In the hall of welcome. She was tending the hall, doing her duty, she said.”
“
A lucky chance. Or not a chance at all. Does it disturb you?”
“It means that in my own time she already knows me. But she’s never given me any indication.”
“So you think she remembers you, so many hundred years later?” He smiled. “Maybe not, after so short a meeting.”
“Are you concerned?”
He gave the dark fireplace a long look, and a fire began to burn there, small at first. “Concerned enough that I wish you to join Malin and me for dinner, to make certain that she does remember.”
Jedda laughed. He looked at her curiously, but she could not have explained at that moment what she found funny. “Do you want her to know why I’m here?”
He shook his head. “The mystery will serve us better. She’ll figure out my purpose for herself, in your day. Though I’ll send a clue or two along with you, when you return, to help her along.”
“And you’ll tell me what I’m going back to face?”
“To the degree that I can.” His face had briefly darkened. “Then it’s agreed, you’ll return to your own day tomorrow.”
She felt a hand tighten around her middle at the thought, but refused it. “Yes.”
She opened her mouth to ask another question but he held up a palm toward her. “Enough,” he said, “I can’t stay longer. If I don’t bring this work to some kind of conclusion there’ll be no dinner for any of us, and I can’t send you home until you’ve had time to talk to Malin.”
“Why?”
“I won’t give you a reason for that.”
“Why not?”
“What hardship is it, for me to give you this gift?” He shook his head, gestured impatiently, and began to dissolve like mist before her eyes. “You should know her as she is now. It will help you.”
“Help me to do what?” she asked, but he was gone.
Only a few minutes later Arvith arrived with several bundles that he spread out across her room, setting some onto the books on the table at which she had been studying. Her costume, he said, for the dinner that evening, which was a state affair.
“State?”
Arvith paused in his unwrapping of one of the largest bundles. “Yes. We do have a state here, you know. And himself is the head of it.”
“But what does that have to do with me?”
“He told me you were invited and you knew about it.”
“I knew I was having dinner with Irion and Malin.”
“The madam will be there, too, of course; she runs a good deal of the business of the place for himself.”
She stood cautiously from the table of books to look over his shoulder. He had left the bundle covered, so far. “How many people?”
“Twenty or so. Plus retainers. Himself is meeting with delegates from the Nesset who’ve journeyed up from the south. The Nesset is our national assembly.”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“There are a couple of important Tervan here, and they’ll be invited; and there’ll be the governor of Davyssa, the royal city that’s close by.”
“And Malin.”
“Yes. And you. You’re to be costumed as one of the members of the House of Turissa, a distant relative of himself.”
“Costumed is right. All these packages have something in them I have to wear?”
He straightened and gave her a look that had in it a certain satisfaction.
“I suppose you think this is quite funny,” she said, sighing. “All right. I’m already in this deep enough. Let’s get started. I’m certain there’s a good deal you have to teach me about all this fabric.”
He had brought a picture to show her the effect, figuring she would be curious; the picture, something he called a woodcutting, offered a stark, black-and-white image of many layers of garments swaddling a body that looked pitifully small. Even when he had unwrapped all the parcels and laid out each part of the costume, she had trouble relating most of it to the drawing. She could see the finely cut trousers, a brocaded fabric edged with geometric designs embroidered in bright gold thread; there was a snowy white blouse that she could not see in the drawing at all. He named the other garments and she wrote the names down, sashalla, a front and back drape, like an open-sided tunic with skirts nearly to her ankles; menoret, a waistband that covered the junction of trousers and blouse; vidor, the overblouse that covered the white one, this one of a stunning blue color that would show off Jedda’s brown skin and eyes; seven or eight other names to cover shoulder guards, a collar to cover the one on the overblouse, a riser collar to wrap around that one, a coronet, garters, hosiery, underclothing, and to finish the picture, a grand black coat with huge puffed sleeves lined with another beautiful brocade, a blue to match the overblouse. The coat had a long train and she was to put it on as soon as possible and practice moving in it. Shoes and shoe ornaments and overboots for the walk across the muddy grounds to one of the formal halls, where dinner would be served. Other protective garments to guard the formal clothing from the mud. “I’ll look like some kind of strange bird growing mating plumage,” she said.
“You’ll look fine. The coat will come off after the cup of welcome is offered; you’ll only have to pose in it a bit and then give it to a householder.”
“Irion has a taste for this sort of thing? Finery and pomp?”
Arvith shrugged. “He plays to his audience. Not by wearing these clothes himself, of course; his rank is so high it doesn’t matter how he displays it. But the politicians from the south love to wear their court clothes, and himself is all the king we have since King Kirith crossed the mountains.”
“Since he died.”
“Yes.”
She studied the drawing again, and then herself in a mirror that had been wheeled in by two of the house staff, along with the parcels. “We have stories, where I come from. Fairy tales. Where people like me are given fantastical garments like these. Look at this little vest. Are these diamonds?”
“Yes, and pearls, of course.”
“This outfit must be worth a fortune.”
“That’s the point,” Arvith said.
She sighed and got to work. He had sent for a tray of food, and she found herself starved when it arrived; fruit and pastries stuffed with various meats and greens, very flavorful. Several dishes of various kinds of pickle, which were all delicious, and some quite pungent. A flask of cool wine, light and sweet. She sipped the wine as Arvith filled a bath for her, behind a screen in the corner of the room. Water flowed into the tub from a sluice in the wall, cold and clear, from a cistern on the roof, he said. It would be cold, she thought, till he ran his hands along a line of carving in the stone. She had stuck her finger into the water and could feel it warming.
“Be careful not to touch the tub till the water’s hot.”
“I don’t know how to take a bath in this thing,” she said. “What do I do, lie down in it?”
“Haven’t you ever lain in a tub of water before?”
“Why would I?”
He smiled. He was testing the water temperature, pouring in a fluid with a scent that reminded her of the smells in the gardens. “You take off your clothes and you soak in it. This is a cleansing additive, made from the hearts of flowers.”
She did as she was told, feeling no more modest than he appeared to be. The tub was comfortable to lie in and the hot water soothed her skin and muscles, drawing her into itself like a warm bed. The scent of the oils infiltrated her head, opening her sinuses. Arvith handed her the glass of wine and she sat up against the back of the tub to sip it. “All right,” she said, “I suppose I must admit this has certain satisfactions.”
“Your customs are very different, I suppose?”
“Is a manner of bathing a custom?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
She splashed her hands a bit. She liked that Arvith could stand and talk to her completely without discomfort; so many men were prudes and would have felt it necessary to fake some sort of lust. “Where I come from, using this much fresh water to bathe woul
d be considered a hopeless extravagance, the sort of thing for Orminy lords in operas. The same sort of luxury as burning wood for heat.”
“But water and wood are abundant.”
“For you and your people, maybe. But if you can wrap your head around it, try dividing your wood and water—and land and everything else—by thirty billion or so.” They were speaking Erejhen; she had to pause to get the numbers right, since numbers must be precisely sung. “Did I do that right?”
“The number? Yes. Quite well.”
“Numbers in your language make me nervous.”
“I must say I felt the same in studying your own system for speaking numbers; your mathematics must be rather odd, being so imprecise.”
“So it’s true you sing calculations, too?”
“We follow a system the Tervan use, though ours has grown away from theirs a bit. Himself studies the mathematics with a Tervan scholar of much repute, one of the women with whom you’ll be dining this evening. She was the chief engineer of the gate, in fact. Or will be, rather.”
“How do I know when I’m clean?”
“You decide you are, then you stand up, and scrape away the residual oil from your skin with this.” He offered her an implement that looked something like a blunt-edged knife with a curved handle. “I’ll be happy to do it for you, if you like. Or, if you wish to use the southern custom, you wipe away the bath oil with a cloth. And afterward we rinse you and dry you.”
“I think the cloth suits me better, I might take off skin with that thing.”
“Your choice,” he said, and shuffled out of sight. “Are you ready, then?”
“How long till dinner?”
“You have plenty of time, though you need to practice moving in the coat.”
“Then I suppose I’m ready.”
When she was dry and the tub drained, he layered her shoulders and neck with three kinds of scented oil, a drop of each on her shoulders and neck, which she spread smoothly into her skin. The scents were wonderful, a kind of spice, a hint of flower, and something much deeper, earthier. “Blossom, tree, and hearth,” he called the oils. “Just enough to rise through the layers of your clothing.”