Blue Window

by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

  She cupped the flower and thought of the sharp tang of the sea and hands open to the sky. Still on the wall was the golden tapestry, and outside she could hear a group of girls running in the high corn, and in the hall, the footsteps of people moving past the door. But shining in her hand was the flower, and she saw it like a candle’s flame, burning bright in a room crowded with shadows. She felt a tug of heat that slipped down her arms and tingled in her fingertips. Beside the open-palm, the air wavered, like an image reflected in water. Her hand shook. There was weight in the air, and now texture. A moment more, and a second flower glimmered and took shape beside the first.

  Nell nearly dropped it.

  Two flowers, identical, sat in her cupped hands. Shakily, Nell ran a finger over the silky petals of the new one, then brought it close to her face. It smelled of vanilla and salt. She smiled.

  Immediately, she sat back and opened her mind to flowers. The air sizzled faintly, and Nell jumped at the shock of heat flowing through her. She felt suddenly as if she had lived every moment until now as one lives in a dream, seeing only flashes of things, images and slices, but never the whole. Now she saw it. The air around her was heavy and listening, and everywhere were seeds, ready to bloom.

  She made flower after flower until her bed was littered with pink blossoms and the room perfumed with the smell of vanilla and the sea.

  Max came back to visit at last, the next night. He was beaming when he arrived, but the only one who beamed back was Jean, who showed him the little pile she’d made of his letters. Though Nell had wanted him to come as much as anyone, seeing him irritated her because he had the look of someone almost too happy to talk, too full of having exactly what he wanted. She knew that feeling, because she’d felt it herself, the moment the flower had formed in her hand.

  Of course, Max being Max, no amount of happiness could stop him from telling them about how great it was to learn with the old man, up there in the sunny room.

  “He calls me son now. You know how old-fashioned people do that? But I think he means it, kind of. He says he’d teach his own son what he’s teaching me, if he had one. He never got the chance before. . . .”

  Listening to him somehow drained the joy from Nell. She felt a small hurt flare in her chest, small like the pin that punctures the balloon, or the tiny break that starts a slow leak in the bottom of a boat. She realized after a while that Max was too full of his own happiness to see them, really. He didn’t see Kate sitting glumly by the window. He didn’t see Jean slowly deflate, watching him, until she sagged on the bed, slapping her Barbie against her knee. He didn’t see Nell nudge aside the pile of flowers at her feet. She’d been waiting to show them to him, but now she pushed them out of sight. Worst of all, he didn’t see how the moment after she greeted him, Susan’s face had glazed over again until she sat like a statue in the chair, moving only when she winced and jerked her head as if trying to shake something loose.

  “You won’t believe what we did today,” he said. “Tur Kaysh said he’s been waiting for a student like me. We barely stay inside anymore. He takes me out to the gardens, to show me things. He says before the blight came — that’s what he calls the Genius — isn’t that a perfect word for him? Before the blight came, the world was a lot healthier all around. He said people barely even got sick back then, and neither did plants or animals. And if they did, well, the scholars back then could heal them — that’s how good they were.”

  Nell wanted to break in, and she had the urge to say something cutting. But there was nothing to say. She wished the old man had been waiting for her.

  But Max eventually became aware that none of them were saying anything. He looked around, frowning.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Jean slapped her Barbie against her knee, twice, three times.

  “You’ve been gone almost a week,” she said. “I thought you were coming to take us home.”

  Max colored. “I’m sorry, Jean, it’s just — there’s so much to learn. We work late, just the two of us. And I am working on getting us home. It takes a lot to make a window, you know?”

  Kate brightened. “So you’ve asked him about it?”

  “Well, not exactly, no —”

  “Not exactly!” All of Nell’s confused resentment shot like an arrow to that point. He hadn’t asked about the window! What did he think he was doing there, anyway?

  “What are you waiting for?” she shouted. “You think we like sitting around here? Look what it’s doing to Susan! You’re the one who said they knew things in this place. Well, do they or don’t they?”

  Even Susan looked up at that. Max glanced at both of them, abashed.

  “It’s not exactly the way you’re thinking. Listen, I know it isn’t easy for you guys to wait, but the window — there’s nothing like that here. Tur Kaysh talks all the time about what I’m here to do. What do you think he’d say if I asked him how to leave?”

  Nell glared at him. “Why don’t you ask him and find out?”

  But Max only shook his head. “It’s not like that. I will. I mean — I’m going to figure it out, but I’ve got to learn more, don’t you see? There’s so much more here than we knew! And he treats me like his own son! Don’t you see I won’t learn anything if he thinks I’m crazy? Or just ready to run off the minute I get the chance?”

  He stopped then, aware, maybe, of the way they were all looking at him. He thought they didn’t understand. But Nell knew that feeling of wanting something terribly, wanting it more than you’d ever wanted anything before.

  She understood it, but seeing it in Max now, this way, only made her angrier. And Max saw that anger, and Susan’s silence, and Kate’s disappointment and Jean’s hurt, and he flushed.

  “You don’t understand,” he said again. “Today he showed me this poem that —”

  But Nell had heard enough.

  “Do you think we care?” she snapped. “Because we don’t, Max. We care about one thing: getting out of here. So are you going to help us or not?”

  Max’s face was deep red now, and his neck was, too.

  “You don’t get it at all,” he said. “Susan, tell her!”

  But Susan said nothing. Max shook his head and went to the door. Jean jumped off the bed and ran after him.

  “Max!” she said. “I care about poems!”

  He turned back briefly and tried to smile. “I’ll write you a letter,” he said. “And tell you all about it.”

  Jean and Kate followed him down the hall, and when they’d gone, Susan stood and said she needed to go to the library, where Nell knew by now she would walk the long hall, looking at nothing. She let her go without a word.

  Alone in the room, Nell bent to retrieve the flowers and found that the first of them, the one she’d gotten from the garden, had begun to wilt. She threw it away. The glow of the day had been all erased, and nothing seemed easy or possible anymore.

  Desolate, desolate, desolate

  The ruined lands

  Where children wail, unanswered,

  And mothers cry alone

  In the barren wood.

  — Writings of Eyn, Age of Fire, Ganbihar

  The seer of the age of fire had named the bleakest of sounds unanswered weeping. Often the exile thought of the great dispersal, for in that age, exile had come to all. Banishment was an old punishment, far older than the sanctuary. As old as the time of visions, or perhaps, if not so long ago as that, at least of the golden age of sage kings, when the disputes of thinkers sometimes flowed out of the halls of learning and threatened the places of power. But exile then was merely a brief turning away, a rebuke. No madness came with it, no endless term alone. For they lived in a fuller world then, where no one was lost for long, but only wandered a land rich enough to absorb the wayward until his time came to return, forgiven.

  Then had come the age of fire, plague, and banishment. With it fear, and rage, and madness.

  How was it, the exile thought, that this was the world f
amiliar, that this was the known? Only in the old writings could one find that other, softer time. And what would those ancients have said, seeing the sanctuary and the mountain?

  In the night, again, had come dreams. This time, they were no images of thwarted hope, but the sounds of fear and despair. A child lost in a gray dust, one voice calling to another, unheeded. The exile tore from sleep to escape it. But the broken silence of the mountain held in it no memory of the cities and farms of old, waiting to welcome the wanderer. There was nothing, waking or asleep, but desolation, three times over.

  With the brightness of that first flower had also gone Nell’s appreciation for lessons. Even when Mistress Leeta brought in the extended stanzas of the chant of seeds, full of the names of ancient plants that had by now been lost, Nell could find no interest in it.

  Worse, Max kept his promise, to Jean at least, and next day she came running in with the newest letter, delivered to her by Mistress Dendra herself. She broke the seal and handed it straight to Susan for reading. Nell was so glad to see Susan interested in something besides her long aimless walks that she didn’t even protest. They all sat down on the bed to listen.

  “Dear Jean,

  I’m sorry about yesterday. You might just be the only one who gets how important it is for me to be here, even if it takes longer than we were hoping.”

  Nell snorted loudly at this, and Susan frowned at her. She cleared her throat pointedly and continued:

  “It’s not like school back home. That poem I mentioned? That was about a tree. When I read it the first time, I just thought it was a nice little rhyme, but the Guide told me it’s not just words, like at home. It’s instructions. Then he read it, and all of a sudden I could feel this buzz in the air, that wanting feeling I’ve noticed before, only much stronger this time. It’s like the air’s ready to change things, cook something up. I wish I knew what made that work, but I haven’t figured it out yet. I will, though! Tur Kaysh says it’s just in the nature of things, but of course he hasn’t been back home, where it’s different. Most days now are like that. We spend them outside in the garden on our own, and yesterday, after he taught me the poem, he held my hand out to the air, told me to close my eyes, and said I could bring the tree to life like that, layer by layer, just following the rhyme. I tried it, and you know, it worked! I felt the air go funny the way it does, and I wanted to open my eyes, but he covered them, said feel the essence of the thing, boy, which like I said is what he calls me. That and son. So I didn’t use my eyes anymore, but my mind, and all of a sudden I could feel the essence of it, like I was inside it, instead of looking at it from outside. It was a red maple, and I could smell the sap coming as the bark wrapped over it. I could feel the color just under the green as the leaves unfolded. Soon those leaves were tickling my palm. Can you believe it? Remind me, Jean, and maybe I can take you to see my tree one of these days. Isn’t it something here? In some ways, it makes more sense than home does. Tell everybody we’ll figure it out soon and then we can maybe go back and forth through that window as much as we want. I wouldn’t mind coming back for a visit, and you can come with me.

  Your brother,

  Max”

  Susan folded the letter and handed it back to Jean. “Well, that’s something, isn’t it?” she said to Nell. “He’s learning. If he can make a tree, a window can’t be far behind, can it?”

  But the letter lodged like a piece of dry bread in Nell’s throat. For the rest of the day, she couldn’t help picturing Max alone with the old man, and that tree rising to meet his waiting hand. Not a single one of the mistresses could do anything like that.

  By the next day, she was so disenchanted with everything in the first band that it took her a moment to register that Mistress Meva came in the afternoon not to lecture but to announce a gardening day. Beside Nell, Wista let out a happy squeal, Minna grinned, and even Zirri smiled. They gathered their tools and stood in line waiting for the Shepherdess as she disappeared briefly and returned with a sack for Nell. Nell checked inside and found a spade, a small rake, and several packets of seeds. Annoyance flared. Max wasn’t working with a spade.

  “To each her own plot of food and of flowers,” Mistress Meva said too cheerfully as Nell examined the bundles, wrapped in dried grass that had been woven into small pockets. “You’ll have a chance to raise both, because sustenance is nothing without beauty. That’s a quote from Tur Lanto, of the second age.”

  Nell resisted the urge to say something sarcastic. She only rubbed her fingers over the grass parcels. They crackled at her touch; the faint aroma of earth clung to them. She followed the others out across the library floor and into the first garden, ducking beneath the weeping willow on the way to the second ring. They emerged among the metalworkers, and Nell looked to see if she could spot Iana and Neetri in the weavers’ booths along the wall. But she was too far away. They crossed the flower beds, full of open-palms and other blossoms she couldn’t yet name, and reached the edge of the second garden, where the vegetable patches spread out below the windows on the outer wall of the third band.

  There was a plot waiting for her, and despite her mood, it did look inviting, a green square full of promise. She couldn’t help wondering if some of the seeds in her packets were open-palms, and what the Shepherdess would say if she told her she had no use for seeds. The thought gave her a brief flush of satisfaction, but she glanced up at the third band and thought of Max and the old man on the other side. The thought dampened her interest in sparring with the Shepherdess, who seemed a little pitiful suddenly.

  Besides, the woman had begun the chant of seeds, and the girls were joining in. Its rhythm quieted Nell, and she bent to the earth to begin.

  To the soundless voice the seed . . .

  The heat rose as they worked, planting, watering, and weeding. Even Wista, who for a time talked happily about the progress of her flowers, soon grew too tired to say anything. Nell thought of the cool shadows of the third garden as the sun burned through her thin dress and drew lines of sweat down the side of her face. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the Shepherdess, red faced, standing in the limited shade of a dogwood, wringing out a small cloth she kept running across her forehead.

  “Do you stay here all afternoon while we work?” Nell asked the woman.

  “Certainly. Why?”

  Nell wiped a mud-stained hand across the back of her neck. “No reason. You just look so hot. I think you ought to drink something.”

  Mistress Meva smiled. “I would enjoy some more shade.”

  Nell tugged at a dandelion root she’d just noticed at the edge of her square of land. “Well, we’re big enough to come back on our own. Why don’t you go in?”

  Mistress Meva hesitated, looking from the row of girls up to the wall of the third band and back.

  “I shouldn’t,” she began.

  Nell said nothing. She waited, and sure enough, a moment later, the Shepherdess exhaled loudly, waved a tired hand in front of her face, and called, “Minna? You’ll lead everyone back when they’re done, won’t you?”

  Minna looked up from the small bush she was pruning. “Certainly, Mistress. Thank you!”

  The Shepherdess had not been gone ten minutes when the girls began to rise and dust off. “It’s awful hot today,” Wista said. “I don’t think Mistress Meva would mind if we stopped early. Do you, Minna?”

  “Oh, no! She wouldn’t want us to keep at it in this heat, I don’t think.”

  One by one they drifted away, until only Nell remained. When they’d gone, she stood and made her way through the passage to the other side of the third band, thinking with some satisfaction that there was more than one way to use your mind to get things done.

  The heat had emptied the scholars’ garden.

  Across the width of it, Nell caught sight of the iron gate that led into the center, what the Master Watcher had called the heart of the sanctuary. A thick lock hung from it. She turned and peered down the length of the third wall. Here, on its
inner face, a series of doors stretched away from her into the distance. She wondered in which thicket she’d find Max’s tree. Moving silently along the path, she peered beneath willows and into mossy patches rimmed with bushes, keeping an eye all the while on the closed doors along the third band wall. She had half a mind to sneak in and peek through one of the classroom doors. The scholars in the old days could heal people, Max had said. Even now they could make trees grow from nothing and cloud the valley with mist. They knew about lots of things, none of them hinted at by the mistresses. But the thought of Max and the old man elbowed even that out, and she looked searchingly into the trees, wondering if they were there or in the airy room at the top of the stairs, full of old books and cool sunlight.

  She came abreast of the door she’d gone through with the Master Watcher. To her left, a clump of hawthorn and dogwood made a thick screen across the garden. She paused, considering where to go, when she heard Max’s voice. A question, though she couldn’t quite catch the words.

  The old man said something in response, but she could hear only the melody of him. She crept closer and peered into the shadows. There were tall trees past the dogwoods. A fat sycamore with scaly bark, a magnolia. And in a little patch of sunlight, a slim young maple, just about her own height. She stopped, suddenly breathless.

  Just steps away, Max stood facing the old man, who sat on a bench with his back to Nell. Max bent toward him, nodding, intent. Nell’s heart thumped, and she took a step closer, clinging to the low branches of a dogwood.

  That song of a voice came more sharply now. “Concentrate,” the old man was saying. “See the color. See the heat. What is its essential quality? It devours. Can you see that?”

  Barely nodding, Max fixed his eyes on his own cupped hands. He looked sweaty and tired, but Nell had never seen him more completely absorbed. She could feel the weight of his will in the air, feel that undercurrent of hunger, that buzz of wanting he had written about tugging at her own skin. She almost stepped out to reach for him, the wanting was so strong. She wanted it, too, whatever it was! Show me! she thought. Show me, too!