by Clayton, Jo;
She set the lamp against the wall under the window. Floor first, she thought. An icy draft coiled round her ankles. No. Fire first.
When the fire began to crackle and add its light to the candle lamp’s, she stood in the center of the room and looked around at the sorry desolation where once there’d been dignity and beauty. She went to her knees, knelt without moving, sick with memory and with the sudden realization that the anger she was feeling now at the vandals was only another face of the anger that had driven her to turn against her own blood. Forgive yourself, She said. It’s easier to forgive them. She sighed and opened her eyes, got stiffly to her feet.
Humming the chants she could remember so she wouldn’t remember more troubling things, she began sweeping up the debris that cluttered the floor, leaves, fragments of stone, bottle shards, the ruins of the tapestries, a year’s worth of dust and dead bugs.
She fetched the rags and pumice stones she’d forgotten and began cleaning the floor, slopping soapy water onto the tiles, using rags to wash away old urine and feces, the clotted dust, not trying to deal yet with the paint. Handspan by handspan she removed the filth from the mosaic tiles, changing the water several times before she finished. Then, with pumice and scraper she attacked the thick paint, the smears and splatters, the glyphs of obscene words, humming to herself as she worked, the humming just a pleasure now, no longer a barrier to thought. She wasn’t angry any longer. She was too busy to be angry, attacking a tiny patch of floor at a time, trying not to harm the glaze on the tiles, in no hurry at all, happy when she got a single tile cleaned off, contented at spending hours, days, perhaps a full passage on a task she’d have screamed at a while before. She took little note of the passing of time until the growing chill and darkness in the room reminded her that there were other things she had to do and many days to finish the work.
She sat on her heels and stretched, working her back and shoulders, wriggling her fingers. The fire was a faint red glow nearly smothered in gray ash. The candle was a stub hardly a finger-width high. It was totally dark outside, the colored rounds of window glass turned to different shades of black. She looked at the cleaned tiles with satisfaction, their bright colors winking at her in the dying light. She’d cleared off a space as long and as wide as she was tall. Setting the worn pumice stone against the wall, the scraper beside it, she got to her feet, plucking at the skirt of her robe which was damp and heavy against her legs.
Taking the lamp and firestriker with her, she left the Maiden Chamber. The foyer was an icebox, but the bedroom was toasty warm though the fire had burned low. She put on a few sticks of wood, waited until they caught, added more wood and left a cheerful crackle behind as she went into the kitchen. After blowing the coals to life in the firebox, she set water to heat for cha, cut several slices of bread, laid thin slices from the posser haunch on them, topped the whole with slivers of cheese, set these concoctions on the bricks to melt, washed the dust off one of the Keeper’s plates and put a new candle in the lamp. When the cheese had melted into the bread and meat and the water was boiling, she assembled her meal, sat at the kitchen table, almost purring with contentment, sang the blessings and began her solitary supper.
When she woke, early the next morning, her lye-burnt, abraded hands had healed as her bruises and chilblains had before. She sang the praises of the Maiden, made a hasty breakfast and went back to work on the Maiden Chamber.
The days that followed were much the same. Hard monotonous physical labor all day, meager monotonous meals morning and night. By the end of the first tenday the cheese was a pile of wax and cloth rinds, the jam was getting low, the posser haunch was close to the bone and she was eating water-flour cakes baked on the bricks, the withered tubers with the rotted spots cut away and slow-baked all day at the hearth of her bedroom fire. At night she slept hard and dreamlessly. When she wasn’t scrubbing, she struggled to reconstruct from memory what she knew of the Keeper Songs and the Order of the Year. How little she did know troubled her at times but mostly she was too busy to fuss.
By the end of that tenday the Great Clean was all but finished. All the sacred rooms were in order and shining with her efforts. But the unguent vessels and oil vessels were broken, the oils and unguents missing; the tapestries were destroyed, the formal robes of the Keeper were gone. The Maiden Chamber was bare. The face carved into the Eastwall was so plowed with gouges and battered it gave her a pain in her heart to look at it, but on the eleventh day she did just that. She stood in the middle of the room, hands on hips, and gazed at the ruined face. “Could I?”
Scent of herbs and flowers.
“Oh, you think so, mmmm? Then I’d better try.” She went up to the stone, touched the face, ran her fingers over the few unmarred bits, trying to get the feel of the stone into her hands. “At least I can smooth this out so it isn’t quite so dreadful a scar and I can learn something about the tools and the stone while I’m at it. After that, well, we’ll see.”
She left the room, frowning and walking slowly, trying to remember what tools she’d seen stacked up on shelves at the far end of the pantry. A mallet she was sure of, an axe, but that wouldn’t be much help until she needed firewood, chisels? She stepped into the foyer, pulled the door shut behind her.
A heavy knock on the outer door caught her in mid-stride. She stared at it open-mouthed, shocked and frightened. A second knock. She stood with her hands crossed above her breasts, her arms pressing hard against her torso. In a way she’d forgotten that there was a world outside the Shrine. All her life, as long as she could remember, she’d been surrounded by people. Surrounded by family and ties and bitter with loneliness. From the moment she’d crossed the threshold here, she’d been utterly alone and for the first time was not lonely at all. She felt a flash of resentment at the person who was shattering this calming, comforting solitude, recognized the feeling and shoved desperately at it. She didn’t want to feel like that anymore, she was furious at herself for entertaining the feeling. She was falling apart, falling back into the tense, angry, resentful Nilis she was trying to escape. Escape? There was none. Forgive yourself. Forgive myself. Forgive. Forgive. No new starts, no changes, the same soul. Live with it. Forgive yourself for being who and what you are. It was a litany, a prayer. The thudding of her heart slowed, her hands unclenched, her breathing slowed, steadied. She looked down at herself, smiled tremulously, tugged the filthy hem down so it hid her dirty bare feet. Walking on the sides of her feet, toes curled up from the icy flags, she crossed the room, took the bar down and shoved the door open.
It moved more easily than she’d expected and she stumbled farther out than she’d intended, putting one bare foot into the snowbank. She jerked back, rubbed her freezing foot against the back of her calf, stood one-legged, holding the edge of the door, looking around.
There was no one in sight, though a trampled track led around behind the sanctuary. I didn’t fuss that long, she thought, they must have raced away. She switched feet, rubbed the other along her calf. “Maiden bless,” she called. The wind’s howl was the only answer. She frowned at the track. It led behind the door. She pulled the door toward her and looked around it.
A bulging rep-cloth bag; two bowls with folded clothes covering what lay inside, a tall covered crock, a lumpy bag. Hopping from foot to freezing foot, she carried these leavings inside, pulled the door shut, dropped the bar in place, then started transferring the goods to the kitchen.
When she had the whole load on the kitchen table, she unfolded the cloth laid on top of one of the bowls. It was another robe, a clean robe. She touched it, smiled, dropped it onto a chair. The bowl held a dozen eggs, a small cheese, a chunk of butter wrapped in tazur husks. The second bowl was covered by a pair of soft clean dish-towels; it held two roasted oadats and two cleaned and dressed but uncooked carcasses. The small lumpy bag held a sac filled with salt, several packets of dried herbs and spices and a small bottle of slayt-flower essence, some woman’s cherished luxury, a gift almost worth more t
han the food in the things it spoke to Nilis. The crock held fresh milk. The rep sack held tubers, dried vegetables, dried fruit, a packet of cillix whose white grains poured like hail through her fingers. Her unknown benefactors had risked a lot to bring this. Briefly she wondered how they knew anyone was in the shrine, then she saw the glass in the kitchen windows glittering with the light of the late afternoon sun and laughed at herself. She’d been proclaiming her presence since the first fire she’d lit. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t here to hide. A sign, She said. A sign of a Presence. A sign that had to be seen to fulfill its purpose.
She put the supplies away in the pantry and on the shelves of the closet, then went back to the Maiden Chamber with the tools she’d started to fetch. She built up the fire, stood before it a moment, warming her feet. I’m going to have to contrive a bath of some sort, she thought. Now that I’m apt to have visitors. I wonder what the other Keepers did. She hadn’t yet found anything like a laundry tub, but she hadn’t been searching that hard and there was a lot of junk piled at the back of the pantry under a heavy film of spiderwebs, dust and mold. She turned her back to the fire and stood gazing at the broken face. First thing is cutting that off and leveling the stone inside the circle. Plenty of stone left in the wall, enough to work with. The face will just be set deeper in, that’s all. She shivered with a sudden exaltation. A paradigm. The Maiden driven deeper than before into the life of the mijloc. She put her hands over her face for a few shuddering breaths, then pulled them away, laughing. How easy it was, after all, this shift from nothing to nothing to everything. Maiden before was fête and chant. Nothing. Soäreh was sourness and spite, triumph quickly burned out. Nothing. Now. Oh now.…
Dragging the kitchen chair up to the wall, she stood on the broad seat, set chisel and mallet to work cutting away the remnants of the old face, learning the feel and cleavage of the stone as she did so, working very carefully, perhaps too cautiously, removing the stone with a stone’s patience, feeling a growing satisfaction as her hands slowly but surely acquired the skills she’d need to recarve the face.
All her life she’d drawn things, creating embroidery designs for her mother and sisters, for anybody who asked, though she was too nervous and impatient to complete any but the simplest patterns for herself. She hated weaving and sewing and the household arts that took up so much of any woman’s time; that was one of the reasons she resented Tuli—the girl continuously contrived to escape the limitations of women’s work and slip away from a large part of their world’s censure for such escapades. It wasn’t fair. Jealousy she refused to acknowledge had made her scold and pick at her sister because she herself lacked strength of will or imagination to make her own escape from a life that stifled her almost beyond enduring. Behind her passivity lay a profound ignorance. She didn’t know what she wanted, she didn’t know any other sort of life. The Biserica loomed more as threat than sanctuary. The thought of thousands of girls like Tuli was enough to make it no place she wanted to be, for it seemed to her that all the meien who Came by and stayed with them were only older versions of Tuli. Even if they weren’t, that was how she saw them. She chipped patiently at the stone, her hands learning its essence, feeling more and more the angles of cut, the amount of force required to chip away various amounts of stone. And her mind drifted along roads taken too many times before, all the hurts, the bitterness, the long struggle she fought against herself, the sense she had of being locked within her skin, of living in the wrong place, in the wrong way. When all the wrongness was taken away, how easy it was to step outside herself, how easy it was to be easy with herself. And how hard it had been once—and might be again, she thought suddenly—how hard to want and want all those things people said you ought to want—a home, a husband, piles of woven cloth, embroidered linens, children, a pantry stocked and overflowing with jams and jellies, smoked meats, cheeses and all the rest of it, suitably humble and happy tie-families—how terrible it was to hunger for what no effort of your own could achieve, the things that came as gifts or not at all, things like charm and a happy nature.
Behind her the fire burned low and began to die. The light coming through the windows dimmed, turned red, then gray. When she finally noticed the darkness and the ache in her arms, she rested her forehead against the stone and felt all the weight of her weariness come suddenly down on her.
Scent of herbs and flowers. A brief flush of energy.
She stepped down from the chair, laid the mallet and chisel on the floor beside it, and stood rubbing at her shoulders as she peered through the growing dark at what she’d done. Almost all the face was gone and the background was an odd pocking as if some hard-beaked passar had been banging at it. She yawned. As she moved to pick up the candlelamp she hadn’t bothered lighting, the fatigue was pushed away, but she was surprised by a hunger that bit deeper into her than the chisel had into the stone. She glanced at the fire, thought of banking it to preserve the coals, but didn’t feel like making the effort. She could think only of that roast oadat waiting for her, of the chewy golden rounds of dried chays, the cheese and fresh bread and hot cha to wash it all down. She hefted the chair and took it with her to the kitchen.
She ate and ate until she was ashamed of her greed, ate until there was no possibility of forcing down another bite. Heavy with food, aching with weariness, half asleep, she stretched out in the chair, her back against the wall, her buttocks caught at the edge of the seat, her legs spread a little, stretched out straight before her, giving her a good view of the filthy skirts of the robe and her equally filthy feet, the dirt ground into flesh that looked like pinkish gray dough. She wiggled her toes, sighed. “Bath,” she said, tasting the word and nodding her head. “Tired or not, I want a bath.”
She set water to boil, took the lamp into the pantry and rummaged through the pile at the back, finding a big wooden tub under a heap of broken odds and ends. It needed soaking, might leak some, but it would do well enough for tonight. She took it into the bedroom, set it before the fire. Then she built up the fire until it threatened to leap into the room, knelt a moment on the hearth, sweating, letting the heat soothe some of the soreness in her arms and shoulders.
By the light of that fire, she scrubbed at the heavy robe, scrubbed until her hands were blistered and abraded, the lye soap like fire on them, but she got most of the dirt out of, the coarse material and dumped it into the scrub bucket. She took the sleeping smock down from its peg and sloshed it in the soapy water left over from the robe; its stains came from her unwashed body and the warm soapy water dealt easily with those. She dumped the sodden smock on top the robe, took them both into the kitchen and upended the bucket over a sink full of cold water, sloshed them about a bit, let the water out, pumped more in and left them to soak while she washed herself.
She carried more buckets of hot water to the tub, poured them into the soapy residue until she could almost not bear the heat, added a little cold, then squatted in the tub to scrub at herself. When she finished, she dried herself, then scooped the dirty water from the tub, bucket by bucket until it was light enough for her to manage, hauled it into the kitchen and emptied the rest down the drain. She finished rinsing out the clothing, then used an old rag to wash the soap off herself. More hot water, in the sink this time, laced with cold. She washed her hair, sighing for the mild, scented shampoo her father bought from traveling peddlers, but at least she was clean.
She wiped herself as dry as she could, squeezed excess water out of her hair, then stood a moment breathing deeply, surrounded by the warmth and smells of the kitchen, the burning wood, soap, bread, roast oadat, cheese, chays, damp stone and others too faint and blended to identify. Then she forced herself to move, hung the smock and the robe on drying racks from the pantry, set up on either side of the bedroom fire. She stretched out on the bed, the ropes squealing under her weight, the mattress rustling. She lay a moment on both quilts, staring up at the ceiling and seeing for the first time the mosaic of wood chips, an image of the mijloc bei
ng held in the arms of the Maiden, constructed from a dozen different natural wood shades, a subtle image that only developed out of the woodchips as she stared at them. She sighed with pleasure, closed her eyes, murmured the night chant and began drifting off. After a moment, she eased the top quilt from under her and pulled it up to her chin, then fell into sleep as if someone had clubbed her.
The mallet tucked under her arm, the chisel held point out, handle pressed against her thumb, she was moving both sets of fingers carefully across the cut-away stone, searching for any spikes of stone that had escaped her, this fitful fussing a last attempt to convince herself she ought to postpone the re-carving of the face. She felt uncertain and rather frightened. She touched and touched the stone, the smooth roughness under her fingers slowly seducing her into beginning, the stone calling to her to give it shape.
She faced the stone, holding mallet and chisel, breathing lightly, quickly, searching for the courage to begin.
“Nilis.” Her brother’s voice, angry and afraid.
She turned with slow deliberation and stepped down from the chair. “Dris,” she said. She ignored the Agli scowling behind the boy. She felt his eyes on her, hot angry eyes, but all fear had fled somehow, she felt serene.
The Agli closed his hand tight over the boy’s shoulder. He said nothing, but Dris’s face went pale and stiff. Nilis was sorry to see that but knew there was little she could do about it. Dris’s tongue traveled across his bottom lip. “Nilis Gradindaughter,” he said, his voice breaking on the words as if he were older and in the throes of puberty. “Sister, your place is in Gradintar. Gradintar needs a mistress to see to the women’s work. The Great Whore is finished in the mijloc. I am Tarom. I order you to come home. You must obey me. Or … or be cursed.” His tongue moved once again along his lip, his hands were closed into fists, his eyes shone as if he were going to cry at any moment. “You got to come back, Nilis, I NEED you. Please.…” He broke off, wincing as the Agli’s fingers dug into his shoulder. The frightened child vanished as Dris’s face went blank. “Disobey,” he said dully, “and the curse of Soäreh will land on your head.” He changed again. “Come on, Nilis, huh?” Little brother now too scared to play his role. “Nilis, please, I don’t want to curse you.” His face contorted as he struggled not to cry.