Tributary

by Vivien Leanne Saunders

  “I don’t want to talk to you.” he grunted. I felt myself bristling even though he hastily backtracked: “I want to see Clay.”

  How was that an apology? Of course he wanted to see Clay. Everybody did!

  “Why are you always so rude?” I demanded.

  I pressed my hand over my mouth in shock. It was the first thing I’d actually said to him. I felt like I’d spoken to him before, but I don’t think I had – all of his cold silences and sharp words happened we were all together. I don’t think I had ever said the word ‘hello’ to Master Gaskell. He looked at me as if I was a fish who had learned how to climb a mountain.

  We stared at each other for a moment, and then I swallowed my pride and turned to go.

  “Wait,” he reached out to stop me. His hand caught the silk strips around my stump, and he fell silent. I waited for him to recoil, but instead he very gently loosened his grip. “I’m sorry! Whenever anyone does that to mine, I feel like they’ve set off an itch I can’t scratch.”

  I chewed my lip, confused, until he wriggled his mutilated fingers at me. “Oh. I forgot.”

  “I forgot, too.” he smiled wanly and lowered his hand, “I’m a bit of an idiot, honestly. I didn’t realise I was being rude, but I’m sure I was terrible. What did I say?”

  “Nothing. You mostly ignored me.”

  “And you were offended? Most people would say you were lucky!” he mimed such a display of disbelief that I started laughing. He joined in, and the bright sound was wonderful in the echoing hallways. I hadn’t heard an honest laugh since I left the island.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Lady Harriet, sir.” I said automatically. He raised an eyebrow.

  “Is your first name ‘Lady’? My name isn’t ‘sir’, you know. It’s Jonas.”

  “Harriet, then.” I curtseyed, and he replied with a bow which was either sarcastic or just awful. He was as playful as the Siren, but for him it was completely unrehearsed. Once I started smiling he apologised properly for the way he had treated me. I told him that I felt embarrassed for mentioning it. I was a servant, after all.

  “Do you think that’s why I was ignoring you?” Jonas cursed under his breath, “I haven’t sunk that low.”

  “Low?” I echoed, “It’s only right that a nobleman should…”

  “Noble!” he burst out laughing and gestured to his fine clothes, “I was born in the room my parents shared with their pigs. I haven’t lived in a house since I was ten years old. Hell, if I hadn’t made one up I wouldn’t even have a surname. If I looked down on lower mortals I’d be offending a lot of earthworms, but no-one else!”

  I floundered for words. “Is that where you lost your fingers?”

  “Absolutely. I sold them to buy my mother a golden rooster, a black cat and a beef and onion pie. How did you lose your hand?”

  “I was bitten by a snake.”

  “The worst thing about that story is that it’s probably true.” he sighed. “How tragic. It must have bitten off your imagination.”

  “I don’t like lying.”

  His brown eyes warmed as he looked at me, “Good. Let’s be friends.”

  He spoke differently to Clay. Her eyes were swollen with sleep and there were pillow indentations on her cheek. I felt smug that I looked better than she did, for once. It was mixed with pique. I was the only one who cared. Jonas had seen her looking far more tousled than that!

  He scratched his head awkwardly when he spoke to her. It was clear that he had practiced his speech. He was going away, and…

  “Go on, then.” Clay flapped a hand idly at the door. “I won’t miss you!”

  “You will,” the teasing words were oddly serious, “Clay, I won’t go if you want me to stay. I don’t like leaving you here alone. Or Mistress Dahra, or…” he wrinkled up his forehead and gestured vaguely towards me until Clay parroted my name. The gall of the man! It would have annoyed me an hour before, but now I wanted to laugh. I bit my lip and looked away.

  I felt sorry for Jonas. If I had known what he wanted then I would have spoken to Clay myself, wheedling words into her sleepy ears before the cat had a chance to unsheathe her claws. Jonas humiliated himself while Clay lapped up his words like cream. I wanted to scream at them both! I filled a ceramic washing bowl and carried it to Clay’s room. On the way, completely by accident, I tripped and dumped the water onto her fat head.

  Jonas couldn’t hide his bellow of laughter. He met my eyes, daring me to laugh, but I had to bite my lips. Clay growled a filthy word that she had learned from one of her sailors and picked up the bowl. She threw the last of the water into my face. Then she stormed into her room. I drew a breath. I had honestly thought she was going to smash the bowl into my skull.

  “Well then.” Jonas patted me on the shoulder, or at least splatted his fingers into the water, “Tell Clay I’ll miss her, will you?”

  “She knows. She was just dragging the whole thing out.”

  “It’s because she doesn’t want me to go.” he shrugged, supremely arrogant about his dubious place in Clay’s heart, and winked at me, “I suppose I should get used to breaking ladies’ hearts.”

  “I don’t think Clay has one!”

  “Try not to smother her in her sleep. I know it’s difficult.” he glanced back up at the door, and then rubbed his hair the wrong way. It made him look as if he had fought his way through a storm rather than argued with a Siren. It was almost the same thing.

  “Good luck!” I burst out.

  Jonas looked surprised, and then his face relaxed into a soft smile. He bowed. This time it was so elegantly done that I knew he had been teasing me before. I blushed. Nobody had shown me so much respect in my life. Before I could blurt something else and embarrass myself, the man had gone.

  CHAPTER 9

  It is hard to describe how quickly time began to pass. A week seems like an endless stretch, but it is only seven days, or fourteen meals, or five sets of ball gowns to starch. It is the same amount of time it takes to order a petticoat from the palace seamstress, or to embroider the one that was delivered the week before. It was also the amount of time it took my Mistress to ruin each of her dresses when she started sleeping with the prince. That was how I found out – not by her bothering to tell me, but by finding the ruined bodice where the lace was almost torn from the neckline.

  “I’m sorry.” Clay said when I confronted her. “He just got carried away. It won’t happen again.” But of course it did, with more skirts to clean and stockings to darn, and a week later she stopped bothering to apologize.

  I drew the line when she asked me to make protection liquor. I wasn’t about to defy Sweetwater’s order just because Coluber had humped his way through Clay’s stash. My Mistress spent two days with the simmering mixture fumigating her room, and a scowl on her face. The stench of ergot and red clover was enough to keep the prince’s ardor at bay on its own.

  The only thing that time could not change was the pile of paper in Dahra’s room. She spent hours frowning over it with Miette, signing and scrawling, but the pile never seemed to grow any smaller. I tried to read some of the documents but they made my head hurt. Trade agreements, border laws and outlines for safe passage blurred together into inscrutable ink.

  Two months passed before Jonas returned. His arrival was as nonchelant as always, as if he had only left us a few hours before. When I came back from the kitchen I found him lounging beside the pool. I was so struck by déjà vu that I started laughing.

  “You look exactly the same.” I giggled, and gestured at his clothes. It seemed ludicrous to me that someone would wear the same clothes for longer than a week. Jonas plucked at the sturdy fabric and raised an eyebrow.

  “I could change it if you wanted. Do you keep any spare dresses in this temple of wealth?”

  “I don’t think they’d suit you!”

  I sat down beside him at the pool. He asked me how I was, and so I told him about my weeks, and how they had turned into m
onths. I told him about the endless meetings, and the tedium of making dresses that Clay destroyed in a few nights. Jonas went rather quiet, and then he pushed himself away.

  “I asked how you were. You didn’t answer that.” he said softly. “You’ve lost weight.”

  I blushed and shook my head. “I’m fine. I’ve just been working. I don’t like rich food, that’s all.”

  “What on earth is that?” Jonas interrupted me, gaping at my copper hand, “Can I see?”

  When I hesitated, he moved closer and started unknotting the ties. I blushed and tried not to look down at his bowed head. He smelled like soap, but not the scented kind we used. It was a good, clean smell, like laundered linens. His neck was red where he had scrubbed it, and his hair was still damp. He had made an effort to be clean and presentable, but even to my sympathetic eyes it looked pathetic. His hands were deft and warm. They felt hard. Islanders sometimes had hands like that after they spent an autumn chopping wood. On them, it was ugly. On Jonas it seemed as fitting as the smell of clean soap. My skin tingled, and I shrank away.

  “You’re not supposed to touch me.”

  “I’m not. I’m only touching this… thing.” he finally pulled the hand lose. His mouth turned down in disgust.

  “Don’t you like it?” I asked.

  “Hands aren’t supposed to be pretty.” he turned the thing over and over, running his thumbs along the whorls on the palm. “There are too many useless things in the world. You don’t have to flaunt them.”

  “I know.” I whispered, wondering how he had read my mind. Then I cleared my throat, “Coluber wanted me to have it. The man who gave it to me said the same thing as you. He’s making me one I can actually use.”

  “Then you could pick up twice as many of Clay’s clothes!”

  My eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”

  “Why did they give you this? Coluber doesn’t give a shit about you. If he did, he would have given you something that you could use. He doesn’t want to make your life better, he just wants to… to wrap it in shiny wire so that nobody can see how horrible it is underneath.”

  I hid my scarred arm behind my back. A deep blush spread over Jonas’s cheeks. “Oh hell, did I upset you? I’m sorry, Harriet. I did not mean your arm, I meant all of… this.” he gestured around us, at the shining courtyard, and struggled to find the words. “All this gold and ceremony, pretending they’re making a political statement, but really all they’re doing is showing the Siren off like animals in a menagerie.”

  “They respect us.”

  He scoffed and the last of his polite reserve evaporated, “I’m sure that’s what the courtiers say. Do you know what the real people say in the marketplace? King Shay will never embrace the Yangetti. He’s letting his heir humiliate our whole country by flaunting our goddesses in the streets. Prince Coluber’s noble guests are a witch, a crone, a whore and a slave.”

  The room span around me. I clutched at one of the false rocks to steady myself. My wrist slipped against the ceramic surface, and I fell.

  “Harriet!” Jonas caught me, and I gasped for air as the world righted itself. I couldn’t cry. Shock was blistered my stomach and burned my eyes. I felt my legs tremble, and then I became aware of a pressure around my waist. Jonas supported my whole dizzy weight as if I were nothing.

  “I’m sorry.” I whispered. “I don’t think I’m very well.”

  Jonas cursed, and drew me against his chest. He patted my back awkwardly, as if I were crying, and then cleared his throat when I pulled myself away.

  “Does everyone think that about me?” I croaked. The man scratched his nose nervously, but did not answer. The words came pouring out of me like hot wax. “I’m not a slave. I’m supposed to be the same as them! If Dahra hadn’t cut off my hand I’d be just as beautiful and shallow as she is, not picking up after her when her stupid potions overflow.”

  I did cry then, for a long time, until I reached a kind of numb silence I had not found before. Jonas shuffled his feet a little. He could hardly give me a hug. He searched for something else to say.

  “Did you say that Dahra cut off your hand?”

  I nodded, relieved to have something else to think about. An hour ago I would not have confided the contents of my breakfast to him. Now, I told him about the snake, and the sickness that had made black stripes course down my white skin. I told him how Dahra had slapped me when I threw up her noxious potions, and I told him about the burning blade she had pressed through flesh and bone. I remembered the heat, I said, more than the pain. I expected it to hurt; I did not expect it to burn me. The last sensation I had felt before my hand was completely severed was of clutching it tightly in my other palm. My fingers tangled up in each other, helping me to bear the pain of our separation, until suddenly half of them no longer mattered.

  Jonas listened quietly, and his gaze drifted down my body and onto my wrist. He took it between his coarse fingers, and unwound the bandage. It was stained with sweat from the prosthetic socket. I had to tear my eyes away. I had seen the mess of puckered ridges so many times they barely registered, but I couldn’t bear to see them through Jonas’ curious eyes.

  If he had pitied me I would have hated him, but he did not notice my shame. I was grateful for it. While I finished the story he gently retied the silk strips, and stroked them into a smooth flatness so that they might slide easily back into the socket. I could feel the warmth of his fingers through the fabric.

  “You’re smiling.” he said.

  “It tickles.”

  “Does it, now.” he looked down in surprise, as if the wound had failed to inform him of this fact. He was teasing me. I flushed scarlet when I realised he knew exactly why I had been smiling.

  As I was floundering for words we heard booted footsteps thudding towards the courtyard entrance. In three seconds Jonas and I were on opposite sides of the room, completely ignoring each other.

  “River!” Jonas called out when my Mistress stepped into the courtyard. When she saw him her face glowed in an odd mixture of pleasure and irritation.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Don’t you already know, Lady Siren?”

  She pulled a face. He gestured idly to his pack, “I brought you some presents. They’re mainly trinkets – pretty, useless things that I’m sure you’ll enjoy. I thought you might like to see what the real people in this country are worth.”

  “Bring it here, Harriet.” Clay said, not even glancing at the bag. I trudged forwards, thinking about being a slave, not even a servant. It would not have stung so much if I hadn’t agreed with every single one of the other words. Dahra: Witch. Miette: Crone. Clay: Whore.

  Harriet: Slave.

  “Do you want me to open it for you, too?” I asked, my voice heavy with sarcasm. Jonas looked at me, and I was amazed at how blank he suddenly was. It was as if he had never even seen me before.

  “I think Clay can do that herself.”

  “Yes, I’ll do it.” The woman took the bag from me, and then smiled as if I was giving her a gift, “Thank you, Harriet.”

  “Aren’t you going to thank me?” Jonas goaded her. The woman’s smile twisted into a smirk.

  “I half expect this bag to be full of spiders. I’m not going to thank you for playing a trick on me.”

  “I’m not ten years old any more, River.” he said with baited patience, “Stop play-acting. If you treat me like that insipid noble cuck I’ll go to Dahra instead.”

  Clay flushed and her lips thinned. She was about to say something when she remembered that I was watching. She swallowed and turned her attention to the gift. She must have felt humiliated, and I felt a little sorry for her. Jonas patted her shoulder and leaned over to help her open the bag. They shared a smile, and just like that I hated the bitch again.

  Jonas had brought toys, and spinning reels, and a small clay pipe. He handed them to Clay, who took them with a look of simple happiness. When he gave her a toy bird she laughed and ran her f
ingers along the painted blue feathers.

  “They have real blue birds here.” she said. “I saw them in the menagerie.”

  “In the countryside they’re still painted sparrows.” The man showed her the animal’s characteristic stubby beak. Clay’s face set into a cool mask, and she picked up the pipe. It made a sound like a strangled cat when she blew into it. She squeaked and dropped it.

  “Can I have it?” I picked it up before Clay nodded. The pipe made a soft sighing sound when I played it.

  “I followed a tinker for a few days. These are the things that people save money to buy.” Jonas pointed at the toys and trinkets. “They think they’re beautiful, or that their children will like them. I thought you’d want to see them.”