My relationship with Yestril could never have grown without it, not only because he first met me with the troupe but because in his madness there are whole periods in which he cannot speak, but only dance.
I watch my son Yarren carefully for fear that he should show signs of his father’s affliction. I don’t know what I would do if I found any, or even what they would be, exactly. Madness is hard to detect in children. Chiefly, I am at a disadvantage because I am sigil-blind. Where I was born, birth-month was not important. People were free to lie about their birthdays if they wanted to; no-one could tell. Here everyone can tell and a great deal hangs on it: who you can marry, what festivals you can attend, what jobs you can hold, what gods you honor.
Yarren was born in the third month of spring. I know this well but I cannot smell it in him, or read it in his aura, or sense it however other people do here. So far it seems that either he is not sigil-blind, as his parents are, or perhaps, if he is, he is already good at compensating for it. For he does not offend continually, as I still do, and as Yestril would if his rank were not so great as to discount it most of the time. Yarren plays with the proper playmates at his school; eats with the right ones; waits until the correct servant can take him to the bathroom.
Yes, the prince Yestril is sigil-blind. It is a rare disorder of the brain. It makes his life very difficult. In itself this would not be enough to classify him as insane, but in his case his condition is complicated by other strange reactions. At times, for upwards of a month at a time, he is bereft of the powers of speech: he cannot form words and shows no recognition of spoken language. Such periods typically follow spans of either agitation or depression that recur themselves at intervals, sometimes separated by a year or more. He is at all times very sensitive, to light and heat and sound. For all this, he is the wisest person I know, and, it seems to me, at no time more wise than when he is without speech. Then we two speak, perfectly, by dancing.
Sometimes I feel as if my whole life made me just in readiness for those times: my whole world and my whole city and my personnel office and my mother and my dance classes and everything about the millions of people who lived there with me shaped me to be the one person to dance with him, in a perfect communion in which words have no part.
It became clear to me, years ago on the stairs, that dancing was intrinsic to this world. I danced my way off the stairs and into human kinship; I danced my way from non-rank into the highest circles of the court. The first ceremony I ever saw here, I remember, was a dance of ascent. A marriage dance, on the stairs. This was just before I met Prevostán.
A woman was moving from one level of the palace, one kin, to another, up in rank and down in floor, the way things go here, in balanced contradiction. The bride, in her splendid red dress, glided down the stair, pausing and quarter-turning in various directions, chiming a pair of silver castanets in her hand at every new step. Her husband led her by the hand, remaining always one step beneath her. When she came to the final stair, where the hallway of her husband’s kin began, she knelt in front of the hall guard for a long time. Her husband stood by her. They both waited wordlessly there until a matriarch came along the hall, and reaching past the guard, gave crichtén to the new bride. Then they were admitted and all of the wedding party after them, each handing crichtén to the guard as they filed past.
By imitating the posture of the bride, I learned how to get myself food. I remember kneeling at the feet of the guard with my head bowed and my hands slightly raised, as she had done, for hours after the wedding party had gone in. People are usually prone to charity at weddings. My action caused great perplexity, but finally members of the kin—the eighth, I recall—brought me presents of clothing and some food from the feast, on gold plates. The food lasted for days and I kept the plates, and a heavy silver goblet also, and spent more hours kneeling before them when they were empty, in front of one hallway or another. Eventually, they were often filled, though not always.
My first attempts at the spoken language were much less successful. I tried, day after day, to speak to the sweepers. They, of course, speak to no-one. Almost all of them, in fact, are dumb, as Prevostán explained afterward. Deaf children, or those speechless, are often given over to that service. Boring as it is, it is a matter of ritual, so it is respected. It is their job to sweep or scrub the stairs free of all filth and refuse and to collect lost objects. They answer to no-one but their sweepmaster and molesting them is one of the few crimes of the stairway. Fallen gloves or books or scarves can be collected from their master, though never money. If that falls on the stairs, in whatever amount, it belongs to the sweepers that found it. That way, no-one on the stairway can find or save enough for crichtén.
The sweepers cleaned up the shit I left behind on the stairs but they spent a lot of their time cleaning up blood. Vendetta is common on the stairway. Most other crime is rare. No-one ever touched my golden plates, even while I slept, and I was never harmed. Though I feared rape or attack constantly, knowing nothing of the rules, and as the place seemed insanely and unpredictably violent, no assault ever came. Not to me. I had no honor.
One night I overheard—for I could not bear to watch and fled away at the first sign—a savage beating which ended after an agony of screaming and cries for help that must surely have been heard from top to bottom of the stairway and by many beyond. Nothing ever came of it except that I saw sweepers scrubbing wide brown stains off the steps some hours after. So of course I lived in terror, assuming I was surrounded by barbarians, without law or compassion. I had not yet seen them in tribe.
The stairway is a tribeless space. No master or kin has explicit power there. Only in the extremest of circumstances will the queen’s guard act there. A man may attack another man on the stairway, in sight of many, and none of the usual bonds of kin or sigil will prevail; he may insult him, wound him, or even kill him, and no-one will abet or defend either party. Honor-debts are therefore often claimed there. It is difficult to attack an individual in a hallway or even in the grounds, as people here are so rarely alone. Formal challenges are fine in the communal spaces of the palace; these are rituals, and kin are needed to act as alternates and to arrange the legal aspects of a challenge. But more casual or quick responses to smaller insults, or other private feuds, often work themselves out on the stairs, where other people will not interfere.
It is a curious and terrible space, the stairway. Malefactors can be driven there, to endure their shame in the public eye: it is a kind of jail. Victims will flee there—runaways, slaves: it offers sanctuary. Unwanted babies are abandoned there, kinless, for any to take or ignore. The wrong people can be seen having sex there, unpunished: men with men, or members of close kin. They are left strictly alone, and indeed treated as if invisible.
I have talked about it many times to Yestril, my memories and fears of the place. For years after my escape I avoided it, and would only scurry through it blindly, my crichtén clutched in my sweating hand. I had extra pockets sewn in my clothes, each with a crichtén untouched inside it, just in case. The legal maximum you can carry is five. People make jokes about it: da’ot het fle’ot, the friendless carry five. I carried five. Early in our courtship, when I was still with Arian’s troupe, I went so far as to challenge Yestril about it, to goad him as the queen’s son into policing the stairway.
“I can’t,” he said simply. “No-one can.”
“Why not?” I said angrily.
He looked at me soberly for a minute. “It is the between place,” he replied. He was silent for a long time. Then he continued abruptly, as if broaching a taboo: “We are free there. We are never free otherwise, constrained as we are by so many laws and traditions and the sigil-bond, too, stronger than all. There a man walks—a woman, too, I believe (and here he made the inclusion gesture from the protocol dance, the hand moving out from heart center, palm inward, in a quick clockwise circle)—in his own person, at his own risk. The stairway is—” He paused again. “—the balancing place.
We are people of the bond. There we are free, absolutely free, just as we are bound in every breath and step everywhere else. The two are exactly counterposed.”
“But how,” I asked, “can the sigil-bond not work there? I have seen people in this hallway pulled from their sleep to help a sigil-mate in the next room … ten women converging at the door of one woman in labor … people who cannot touch their own children without pain. Such things are involuntary.”
“I don’t know. You know I am the wrong person to ask.” Saying so, he made the briefest sketch of the apology-between-equals gesture, reversed palms out from heart center, turning to come in and meet again. Yestril makes these gestures without even knowing he does them. They are part of his speech. He is always dancing.
“But then how,” I continued, “did I end up there?”
He looked at me in puzzlement. “I don’t know,” I remember him saying, “Perhaps you, also, were too much bound?”
The day I left the staircase ought to have been a great day. But it was not. I had been there too long. My emotions had clamped down, and I could hardly feel anything at all. That took months to undo, maybe years, maybe I am still doing it. It seems to me now that a flash of joy—from a dance perfectly executed, from the sight of my son’s face—is stronger than it was before, almost disabling. All strong emotion shades into fear, or distrust. Feeling becomes too quickly conscious of itself, becomes a problem or an object, something I might lose.
And, of course, when I left the stairway, I was a slave. There was nothing else I could be. I had no kin. I had performed no service, incurred no obligation. Prevostán, tribeless, could not act for me during his vow: only in tribe can bonds be formed. I had nothing of value. Except myself: a beautiful woman is always of value. I had the skill of dancing and a basic vocabulary. You might say I sold all these things to Arian, the owner-senior of the troupe.
Prevostán had been able to approach her because she wasn’t kin. He himself was high born, of the third family, and had once paid for her to perform at a festival. Theirs was a cash-based relationship and therefore no relationship at all—dysala, which means “no-over.” Plenty of things are for sale here, but if you buy them with money, the exchange is meaningless: no honor accrues from it, and no obligation follows from it. Perversely, if a money-deal goes wrong—if someone is cheated, or a wrong price paid—then a true, honorific relationship ensues, as people negotiate over the difference. You over-tip a merchant and he returns the extra to you: he has acted honorably, so you owe him. You find you have overpaid for goods, your family challenges the vendor for honor-debt. They owe you.
Prevostán had proceeded circuitously in order to display me to Arian. He did not own me, so he could not sell me. Explicit commerce is forbidden on the stairs, anyway. No-one may sell anything there. It almost never happens that people try, but if they do, it is one of the exceptionally rare things that will provoke the queen’s guard. Prevostán merely spoke to Arian one day when he met her on the stairs, and told her about me, one of those rarities that had shown up on the stairway months ago, who knew how to dance.
Likewise he had done his best to explain to me the intricacies of non-rank performers and their contracts. The relationship entailed in such a contract lies somewhere between ownership and adoption. If Arian took me into her troupe, she would become my honor-kin, and I would have a foothold in the world, owe and be owed. She would provide crichtén for me, and training, and living space, but she would also name a sum that was my worth and I could not leave her service without paying it, or having someone pay it for me. Wages would be given me, and I could, over time, buy myself back from her, and continue in her service, or not.
The idea of ownership of the person was hateful to me. Such arrangements were common in my world centuries ago, indentured servitude during its building phases, but it had passed out of use so long ago that it seemed impossible. Now I found myself becoming a dancing girl, property of a master. It was incredible, but I had no strength to protest, and no other way out of the between-place that was the staircase.
So on the day that Arian finally came to see me and offer me my freedom and my servitude, I did my best. In my filthy, stained pink dress, lightheaded from hunger, I did eighteen pirouettes in the highest style I could muster, twirling and leaping down from one step to another (ascending in rank, like the bride) and finished kneeling before her with my hands outstretched, silent. She immediately offered me a contract-price but the sum was meaningless to me. I accepted.
*
Looking back on it now, I understand that the sum was considerable. She had to consider her own honor in making it and she figured from the beginning that I would be worth her investment. I am proud of this, and partly ashamed of myself for being proud. The other dancers in the troupe were variously proud or ashamed of their contract-prices. Mine was one of the highest. Other dancers in the troupe—in fact, those with the highest contract-value—often preferred to remain owned, and made no attempt to purchase their freedom from Arian. These people were her star performers, often contracted out further to other companies or asked to solo at festivals and shows, necessitating intricate negotiations, in which the dancers themselves were involved. Their contract-prices conferred status upon them, a kind of rank among people who rarely had any blood rank to call on. On the other hand, those whose contract-worth was low would earn their way out as fast as possible and then try to negotiate better terms with Arian in dysala, as free workers, though she would not always take them.
After that simple bargain, I left the staircase with Arian. She gave me crichtén—the first time I had held money in my hand in all that time—and I gave it to the guard at the fifteenth hallway, where the troupe was quartered. As we went past the guard I burst into shaky tears, and Arian led me weeping away. I did not see Prevostán.
I have wondered ever since if that transaction was legal.
I learned all there was to know about protocol-dance in three months. As I said, it’s not hard. It’s like a simple language, in which there are maybe three hundred words or short phrases. Yet with that limited vocabulary an amazing number of things can be said. After I had appeared with the troupe a number of times, a group of mothers from the eighth family banded together and offered me a fee to teach their children. This is a common enough arrangement but I felt it as a great honor and trust, as a complete stranger. Yet of course, to those women, anyone not of the eighth family, or of the wrong sigil, is a stranger. There are whole classes of people who do not exist for them and they think nothing about it. Incompatible sigils are all strangers to each other.
Perhaps this fact explained people’s widespread tolerance of me and my uncanny lack of a sigil, and corresponding sigil-blindness. I was constantly surprised at how easily people accommodated these things, after the reactions I had experienced on the staircase. People obviously found it odd and were reluctant to touch me, but there was none of the wholesale disgust and drawing back. In the hallways and salles and meeting rooms of the palace people are in tribe. On the stairs, they are not.
I think, though, that there were other factors. Because I myself had no sigil I could teach children of all sigils in my group. In itself this was a shocking innovation, absolutely unheard-of. If it had happened in a higher family than the eighth I am sure it would have attracted the attention of the queen. The very principle was enough to bring down the government. If government is even the right word for how people are ruled here. I don’t know. Mostly they seem to rule themselves, in endless small ways. But everyone has government, I guess. I don’t know much about it.
What I mean is: having no sigil myself meant I could touch all of the children, and correct their posture, and also teach all the sigil-places in the dance. I am, as far as I know, the only person ever to do this. Normally it takes four instructors, as you cannot dance a sigil-part that is not natively your own. Apparently it will make you physically ill, like breaking the sigil-taboo in interacting with other people. The canny moth
ers of the eighth family must have realized this—that they could hire one person to do the work of four. It explains a lot.
I concluded also that some of their distant complacence came from the fact of dysala—I was not in a true honor-relation to any of them, as they had purchased my services. Sigil-blindness, for example, among one of their own kin would have been treated much more seriously, as a dreadful handicap. But I had seen similar cool, unflappable politeness between Arian and her workers in dysala.
With the children things were different again. They were much more relaxed about my lack of sigil. It was curious to them but did not cause the kind of anxiety that I felt in adults. I think awareness of the sigil bond grows with age. They were acutely aware of each other’s bonds and navigated them effortlessly but worried much less about mine. I learned a lot from observing them.
*
I had twelve pupils in my first class, three from each sigil-group. Of the twelve birth-months of the year, there are four groups: spring, summer, winter, fall, each representing a collective of three consecutive birth-months. Children of these groups—and adults, in certain contexts—are sigil-compatible, and can interact extensively. So my spring group could dance together, and the fall group, and so on. But they could never dance all together. Nor did they ever show any sign of wanting to. While any two in a group were practicing in pairs, the third would patiently wait, and then they would change about, never even looking over at the other partnerless ones from the other groups. Children of six and seven years old, excitable and hard to restrain, would instinctively avoid bumping into each other if their sigils did not match, even in the wildest game. They were sweet and kind and impulsive, like children anywhere. It’s just that they would rush up and hug my knees in groups, never all at once, and even bullying never went cross-sigil. My sigil-blindness was comical to them. It was like being taught dance by a dog. Children already think adults are stupid, which is to say, incomprehensible. I was just a special case.
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