“But that would be ondié!” my eight-year-old student Onder reproved me, balking, when I asked him, unthinkingly, to demonstrate a step he had just learned to the whole group. It was, as it happens, a fall step in the sequence acquiescence-junior-to-senior—which differs from the winter, spring or summer versions only in the slight eastward orientation of the body. Did I mention that all the rooms here are marked with the cardinal directions on all four walls? The only place without these marks is the stairway. In my salle the winter children faced slightly south, the spring children north, the fall children east, the summer west. There is a lot of circling in protocol-dance, as everyone works around to the correct orientation in order to perform.
“Ondié, oh no, would it? Yes, of course!” I said, embarrassed. “Then I will do it.” I stood first in front of one group, and then the next, and the next, and demonstrated the step, with its sigil-change, to each group. Everyone relaxed.
Onder, who had turned pale with revulsion at the idea of ondié, performed the step beautifully, in time with me, when I demonstrated it to his group, happily. Strangely, learning it from me was not ondié, as it would have been from anyone of the wrong sigil. It was impossible for me to offend Onder, innocent boy, as he had no sigil-sense from me whatsoever: only blankness, no information. Nothing to induce sweat, tingling, panic, rejection, or to produce a comfortable feeling of order, attraction, security. Just nothingness. When I teach adults, their reaction is stronger, though never anything like I witnessed on the stairs.
Ondié is a word very rarely used, because the experience is so deeply felt. People are not even comfortable saying it, and even after eight years it still gets used a lot in my presence.
Seven years ago, word came to the fifth son of the first family, the prince Yestril, that there was a sigil-blind dancer in the troupe of Arian, owner-senior of the third non-rank troupe. This was after I had been dancing professionally for about four months, and teaching two. Yestril came to see us perform at a moon festival, and immediately knew me as the woman he had once seen on the stairs. He sat near the front and followed me intently with his eyes, and occasionally moved his hands in slight gestures or sketches, as if copying or replying to sections of the dance. This sounds mad—I suppose it is mad—but it was not unattractive. He was not waving wildly or drawing attention to himself; it was as if he was supplying a running commentary, or talking to himself, in whispers of movement. It was childlike. Though I was all the time conscious of his gaze on me, and it was not childlike at all.
As I danced before him on that first occasion, seeing the slight flutter of his hands in my peripheral vision, I was suddenly conscious for the first time that I was dancing a language. I had not been thinking about it that way before, while learning it, a series of steps and turns, by rote, sequences with names, just like learning dance back at home: volte, legato. Now it became clear to me that I was dancing whole phrases, sentences: Pleased to meet you, person of higher rank. I stay far from you in deference to your rank, and wait for the approach of my sigil-sponsor, who can mediate between us, even though we are of different sigils. Joy! The mediator has arrived. Is it not wonderful how this great gap can be bridged? Leap! I leave you this gift of flowers; the mediator brings it. He is kin to me; co-sigil to you: bond between us. Now I presume on my gift and I ask this favor: this place in your guild, this assistance, this daughter for my wife … I could almost see my hands inscribing words in the air, feel them in my feet, a walking alphabet. Yestril gave me a great gift from the very beginning.
Feeling the intentness of his eye throughout the performance, I expected him to approach me afterward. But he did not. I found out later that it was because he could not. He was sinking into one of his periods of muteness. His mother knew; all the first kin knew; she always saw to it that during these phases he attended as many protocol-dance events as possible, as they afforded him some relief. Watching the dance, even such mundane matters as civil servants’ promotions, the marriages of servants, festivals of the most minor deities, gave him a place in the community of speech.
So in the weeks that followed my first seeing him, the prince turned up at a surprising number of small performances. At the marriage of a vintner’s daughter to a furniture-maker’s apprentice I saw him without any retinue at all, just a single servant, guiding him through the crowd after the dance was done, holding tightly to his arm. Yestril’s face was expressionless and he walked with a quick, jerky gait. As the vintner’s daughter had done her wedding-leap, as we were circling around her in our interlocking rings, I remember, he gave an involuntary start in his chair, miming her action of ascent, half-rising. People around him carefully looked away. It occurred to me then that there was something wrong with Yestril, and that he had some other reason for attending the dance. Other than me, that is, which I in my vanity had been assuming was his chief interest.
“Why was the prince at such a minor wedding?” I asked Arian. I was half expecting some arch reply.
“The prince—the fifth son? Oh, he is mad, and the dance soothes him. So it is said, at least,” replied Arian casually.
That was crushing. My mind had been building up great fantasies of escape and alliance and salvation from the moment I had learned that the man whose attention I had so clearly caught was a prince of the first family. How were any of these things to happen if he was insane?
“Mad, in what way?” I asked cautiously.
“I have no idea,” said Arian, “I have never danced for the first family, and don’t know anyone who has. They use rank performers. Though I have heard that he can’t talk.”
“What, not at all?”
“Not at all. He only dances.”
“What! Really? Is that why he comes to so many performances?”
“Perhaps it makes him feel less alone. I have heard he is sigil-blind.” Arian looked awkward. “Like you.”
That was the first I had ever heard of sigil-blindness, in other people. I should have realized, from the very fact that there was a word for it, that it must happen occasionally to those born here. But I had never met one, or heard of one. I had assumed I was unique. The idea was staggering. All my flagging hopes in the prince revived. He was like me! There was another person in the palace who lived in the same blind world I did, missing the fundamental part that told everyone what to do, what the boundaries were. A free man, I said in my heart of hearts, one not trapped like a bee in this stupid chemistry.
I felt that it was up to me then, so I did an incredible thing. At the next moon festival, when I saw Yestril there, still silent, still half-dancing to himself, I went straight up to him after the show. I, a half-owned dancer from a non-rank troupe, approached a prince of the first family, in a public place, without even a sigil-mediator. I knew I did not need one. The fact was so liberating that I did what I had never done before—indeed, something that is almost never done—and made up my own steps in the protocol dance. For where were the prescribed steps for this moment, two people meeting without sigil? There were none.
I was eloquent. No-one there missed my point.
I came up to the prince and his servant as they left, in approach-of-deference. The servant stepped forward and blocked my way. The prince had already turned and was looking avidly, the blankness leaving his face. Without even thinking, I lifted my hand and touched the servant’s bare cheek. The man flinched and staggered back. Ondié. He reeled away several paces, so Yestril could see me fully.
In the sequence reception-of-apology there is an eye-hiding gesture: I am blind to your fault. I came toward the prince in deference, three steps. I made the gesture: blind. I did the slow turn and pointed—note, reveal—at the sigil marks on the four walls. Blind.
I danced myself, a stranger—the steps of non-acquaintance, needing a mediator—with only an honor-kin (I gestured to Arian, standing frozen on the perimeter of the crowd). Coming back from where I had circled near Arian, I struck a changing tangent back toward the prince, no sigils, all sigil
s—I heard the crowd gasp—and came to rest at his feet in the suppliant’s bow: assistance?
Yestril’s face was like the sun rising. The servant made as if to approach, recovering, but Yestril silenced him with a curt wave of one hand, never looking away from my face. I stayed in the suppliant’s posture. The prince rose to his full height, and his body seemed to resolve before me, no longer loose and shambolical but collected. Touching his palms, his breast, his temple, he made all the signs of his rank in full state—the crowd stood a little straighter, and several dropped into curtseys or made signs of deference—and then he did a quick revolution, marking the sigils on the walls, as I had. And then he made, not the blindness gesture I had made, but the gesture to dismiss. And not to dismiss between equals, or near-equals, but to dismiss someone of the lowest rank: a non-rank servant, unsuccessful suppliant, or offender.
He was magnificent. All the faces in the crowd grew absolutely taut. Had he not been of the first family no-one would have borne the insult, and he would have been inundated with challenges.
He came directly forward to me, not heeding the orientation marks. He threw the edge of his short cloak over me, the ritual used to adopt a child. Then he raised me up to stand in front of him, and he held up both palms. The crowd grew electric. The touching of palms here is of tremendous import. It only happens among compatible sigils, on particular occasions. A single palm will seal a bargain, witness an oath, receive an apprentice or a new householder. The double palm salutation is used for rituals of courtship, betrothals, and birth-recognitions. It seals wedded couples and is the last mark made on a coffin.
I raised my palms to his. They did not tremble. I am a trained protocol dancer. We smiled into each other’s eyes, we two, the sigil-blind. I did not know whether I had just been born, married, or adopted, but I did not care.
Eleven months later our son was born. It may shock you to learn that I slept with the prince before he ever spoke to me. But it did not shock me. He had already spoken to me more clearly than any man before or since without uttering a word. It is nearly impossible to lie in protocol dance. A highly trained dancer may dissimulate, but not one like Yestril, a naïf, who spoke the language out of his very being.
I remember I woke up in his bed on maybe the third or fourth occasion and he asked me my name. I was so flabbergasted I didn’t know how to respond. It sounds unbelievable, but the fact is I actually forgot. Can you imagine forgetting your own name? It was a sign of how very far I felt from my old self, how lost that person was to me. But really, I think it is because there is no way to dance a name. That is one of their chief weaknesses. There’s nothing to them, really, no story, nothing to get hold of. They’re just empty.
I had to gather myself together when Yestril asked me who I was in regular words, to prevent myself from leaping out of bed stark naked and dancing the answer for him: I am the one, you silly, you man-with-whom-I-am-intimate, the only one who is like you, sigil-blind, careless, the one who loves you, joyous, unafraid, crazy dog, the one you claimed, daughter-wife-child, lover, kin.
That is who I am now.
After a few minutes I answered him, and I learned he could speak, in words, like a normal man. That is the way his madness works, suddenly: one day he cannot talk, and the next day, even if after months, he can. It all comes back, all at once. He offered to pay my contract-price. He was mystified that I refused the money when I so clearly did want to become his concubine. (Yestril, as prince, can only marry from the first rank to the third.) I could not explain it myself, and it took me some time to earn my way out of my contract to Arian. Mid-way through I became pregnant, so in the end it hardly mattered. But I am still glad I freed myself.
I love Yestril and am glad to talk to him. He is my chief guide here in everything and the only one I can be sure of not offending. We have a son and we need to teach him. Yet we began our relationship without words, and when those times return, I cherish them. I find myself, when we argue, or just grow slowly at odds in ways that words will not repair, looking forward to those periods at which his language runs out.
He does not. They frighten him. I can tell from a growing tightness in his body, from lines around his eyes and mouth as the times come on. He is afraid every time that he will never recover his powers of speech; I see the terror in his eyes and it is terrible. It fades as he adjusts: after a day or two of fear and darkness, his eyes resume their calm. They become still and watchful, and tend to glassiness if he is left long alone. When he is without words, he can act as if absent, moving automatically, responding lethargically, but he can also be moved to fits of sudden brilliance. He can dance then like no-one else in the palace: so clear, so precise, so original.
When Yarren was tiny and before speech himself, his father could be with him for hours and I would never hear a sound from either of them. I would watch them play, and explore small objects, and breathe and laugh and move their hands; they would gaze into each other’s faces and it was as if an invisible current passed continuously between them. Yarren was utterly content, and would be upset if taken away from him. But the baby would not sleep in his presence; it was as if whatever stream of information he received from him was so riveting that he could not let it go. He often had to be carried off screaming, completely overtired.
Our lovemaking during these times is often spectacular, and wholly different in a way that I cannot define.
Yestril slides into these periods through a passage of fear, yet he finds himself inside them, in the dance. He and I can talk then as we can at no other time, and the clearest language of this world is ours to command. We can speak it as no-one else can, dancing all the parts: the whole palace is contained in us. What could be greater?
Yet I am also reminded, especially at the beginning of each descent—in Yestril’s bewilderment, in his painful rediscovery of himself, step by step—of myself waking on the stairway, alone.
I have no need to teach protocol dance now. I am the full concubine of a prince of the first family, mother of a son in the royal lineage. I still teach, though. It is my great pleasure, my best link to people here. In so many respects I am still a stranger, and will always be one. I have kin now; I am a rank performer; my bonds to my students and their families are not in dysala. I am not paid to teach them: I do it to incur obligation, to gain fame, to extend my knowledge of the form. I do it because I have to. That is the person I am here, a protocol dancer of the second grade, licensed to teach the first five rank families.
My mother would be proud. I think that, sometimes, grudgingly. I finally became a professional. Though that is the least of it, profession, such a narrow thing, a moneymaking thing, back where I came from. People were typists; they operated jackhammers; they practiced law; they ran the city pools. We did all these things, trained for them, or not, fell into them, like as not, for money—money to pay the rent, to buy goods, above all to buy time to do other things. Profession bought you time to escape your profession, at least most of the time. Unfair, perhaps, to say so: there was solidarity there, and love of work there, and identity to be gained from it. But not like here. Mine was a whole world of dysala. No-over. And because there was nothing left over—no honor, no shame, no owing and being owed, and none of the places and shapes that those make in the world for us to inhabit—well, we spent all our time and the money that buys time trying to be many people at once, to occupy all the imaginary spaces between us. Ondié.
Now, for example, I teach Pol, the seven-year old son of a princess in the second family, in my fall group once a week. I teach the seasonal groups separately now, in the high kins. Pol is a nice boy, rather pale and shy, only a mediocre dancer. But he gets through it; everyone has to here. In return for that hour every week, I am invited to attend a levée in the princess’s apartment every second week, and there I have been introduced formally to many members of the high kins and many rank professionals, including the apothecary who healed Yarren when he had the croup at age two. The apothecary gave m
e herbs for my son and sat up a night breathing in steam with me, and for this I tutored his wife for three days before she received her last promotion, about which she was very nervous. She in turn introduced me to the chief historian, who was a client of hers, and he toured me through the royal library and introduced me to all the books—very rarely read, ancient and beautiful—of dance notation that reside there. Deciphering those old books—it seems the vocabulary of protocol dance was formerly much greater—has become one of my chief pastimes. I have revived some forms in my classes and am becoming an authority on the old dances, even giving a few historical performances. All this because I teach Pol, because his mother wanted him in the class taught by the first prince’s concubine. Not a coin changed hands anywhere. Now I know those people; I owe them; they know me; they owe me. Back and forth, endlessly. It’s a lot to keep track of. This whole world is an enormous protocol dance.
Today we have heard that he queen is dying: Yestril’s mother. I have met her once or twice, a skinny dark-haired woman with a hawk nose who has gone through three husbands and borne nine children. She is ancient now and has been failing since the summer. The whole bottom floor of the palace is swathed in white cloth to muffle the sound of footsteps, which disturb her fitful rest. Doctors come and go, and the nobles of the first families are paying their last visits of state to receive their final blessings. People expect her to die any hour now.
Then there will be a royal funeral, a huge affair during which they will carry the coffin all the way up the staircase to the eighteenth floor—the first time the queen will ever have been there, no doubt—and back again, with farewell ceremonies at every floor.
Yestril says, that the coronation of the next ruler will be unlike anything I have ever seen. She has seven children living, and many grandchildren, and all of these are eligible for the throne. There is no designated heir. It is in the coronation dance that the new king or queen is chosen. I am not clear how, and Yestril cannot explain it. “It is what we call a strong dance,” he says, “People say it moves the world. All sigils participate, and it’s said that the palace itself dances, and the grounds, everything.”
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4 Page 10