Bloodflower

by Bloodflower (The Returning) (retail) (epub)

  Gyaar lifted a hand to the trunk of the tree that shaded them. ‘That tree was planted for my sister, Shi-mii,’ he said. ‘When a girl-child is born to the Ryuu family, a tree is planted.’ With his own hand, he picked a spray of bloodflower blossom and gave it to her.

  ‘I wonder what my tree would be.’ Graceful tucked the blossom into her sash, her hands into her sleeves, arms folded across her wide middle.

  ‘A willow, for your grace of name and nature.’ Gyaar gazed at Graceful, sop-faced. ‘I will see one planted . . . if you wish it.’

  ‘I will think about it,’ Graceful said.

  Cam and Gyaar sat on the ornamental hill, overwhelmed by the perfume of the flowering summer shrubs. Cam followed the darting red figure that was Diido with his eyes.

  ‘I do not understand it,’ said Gyaar. Cam turned his gaze on him. Gyaar watched the lawn below, watched Graceful wander with her ladies. ‘Everything I say, I say to make her laugh, but I cannot draw a smile from her.’

  Cam leaned on his elbow, face tipped up to the sky. ‘Whenever Graceful visits the town, people cram about and throw flowers, kisses, cheers. She walks among them so that she can clasp their hands, admire their infants, take their gifts of food, lace, heirlooms.’ And you still say that it is you who must invite her to your rooms. ‘How can she smile, when you will not see her fully?’

  Gyaar pushed him down the hillside, and got to his feet. ‘Follow your laugh,’ he called out to Graceful below. ‘That’s all I have to do. Bzzz, bzzz.’ He flapped his hands at the women, who obediently moved off to a distance. Graceful’s distant laugh was silenced.

  ‘She is making him work for it.’ Cam shifted along the parapet of the bridge, so that they touched, he and Diido, down the sides of their bodies.

  ‘Is she just.’ Diido stuck her nose in the air and looked down it. ‘My Lady. Then he bows. I would have you help me. There is a ceremony I need you to perform.’

  Diido mimed Graceful, all awkward and lumpish. ‘Lord Gyaar digs, sweating and raising blisters on his palms. Deep enough, My Lady? And she only nods. Come, now you must help me. He makes her set the tree in the ground, pat the dirt about the roots.’

  The air stirred the boughs and they lifted and dropped, lifted and dropped. Cam listened to her, looked at her.

  ‘Then My Lady just dusts off her palms and watches it, the play of the branches in the wind. It will look very well, come the spring, he says. He moves too fast, goes to take her hand, and she . . .’ Diido sidestepped. ‘What did you think? she says. Give me a tree and I will do your bidding? And he says, You have shown me that I cannot. But I am still waiting for an invitation from you. My Lady was that red.’

  Cam threw back his head and laughed. ‘Will she ask him?’

  ‘I should think so!’

  UP AT THE BIG HOUSE

  Pin told Mam she’d be all day at the Big House, trying for work. ‘Every girl in the village is going there for they do hire today’

  She left the Big House early, because they were done with the hiring early Acton waited for her, down at the waterhole, where the trees grew thick about it and no holdings were near.

  Acton was swimming. He hauled himself out of the waterhole when he saw her. ‘Pin.’

  She walked right up to the water’s edge, right up to him. His skin was cool from the river, but under the water-chill he was warm. Pin loosed him. ‘My dress.’

  ‘Do you get it all off,’ said Acton. He did it for her. ‘That’s better. Uhn.’

  She pushed Acton against a tree, held him there with a hand spread on his belly, but in the end it was her standing with the bark rough down the length of her spine.

  When they were done Pin pushed her face into his neck and breathed his sweat. ‘I did get a job, up at the Big House.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘Aye. Clothes Folder.’

  Acton laughed. ‘They pay you for that?’

  ‘Aye, and I’m not the only one. I do serve as Clothes Folder to My Lady, but there’s one for My Lord and one for their children.’

  ‘It does seem a strange way to live.’

  ‘Lords,’ said Pin. She shook her skirt out and pulled it over her head, settled it around her waist. ‘Ladies. I don’t know how they do bear it, their servants like a fence between them and all the world.’ She turned. ‘Do you help me with my bodice.’

  Acton buttoned her up. ‘Lords! Now you do work there, you’ll think yourself too fine for me.’ He spun her around.

  She slapped him, playful. ‘It gives us more time together, do I get off early sometimes. Besides, it’s a good job.’

  ‘You don’t need it.’

  ‘I do come to you in my own way, with my own means, or I do not come to you at all.’

  ‘You did come to me just then, Appin.’

  She got home and ducked straight into the scullery to wash. ‘Hot for this early in spring, isn’t it, Mam?’

  ‘Aye, and how did you fare then?’

  ‘Clothes Folder, Mam.’

  ‘You do what?’

  ‘Clothes Folder to My Lady.’ She curtsied. ‘I do believe every maid in the village was there, you know.’ There had been a score and half of them, from little Amary Cuttlen who was barely eleven and not even getting her courses, to Nariet who was wed these four years past. ‘All of us standing in line in the sun, laughing and talking. And this woman did come out, this tiny little woman. A face on her like an ill-tempered imp. Hands, she did say. Tss-tss hands!’

  They had held them out, all the girls, all sun-browned and strong, all working hands. The imp-faced woman stroked them back and palm; turned them and held them between her tiny slender palms.

  ‘You, she said. And Mam, she did look straight at me. You. She did jab me in the belly with one bony finger. You others, you go, go now.’

  That was how Pin got the job at the Big House.

  ‘Clothes Folder,’ Mam told Da when he came in that night. ‘To the Big House.’

  ‘Eh? Clothes Folder. Eh! Well done.’

  ‘It’s good work, does pay well,’ said Pin.

  ‘Aye, I am sure.’

  ‘More for my dowry.’

  ‘I can cover that, my maid. You do think I’m too enfeebled to dower my only daughter? Ha ha.’

  ‘I want to do it myself.’

  ‘Most maids would be happy to let their da do it for them.’

  ‘I’m not most maids, Da.’

  ‘Aye, aye. You’re my little Pin.’

  ‘Great tall gangling Pin, more like,’ said Hughar.

  Edord stopped his steady eating to ask, ‘Did you see her, Miss Fenister that was?’

  ‘No, she is not yet arrived, but soon. And you would never know she was Fenister’s daughter: they just call her My Lady.’

  The yard was near as big as the village square, all of pale fine gravel, with trees cut to shapes standing about. It looked different today, without the crowd of village girls. The steps up to the door ran all the length of the house. Pin climbed them, one, two. She looked about the empty yard. She listened and heard only immense silence from within. She lifted her hand and knocked.

  ‘You!’ The imp-faced woman opened the door. ‘You go round back! Not use this door. You not lord!’ She slapped the door shut. Pin turned and went back down the steps, one, two, and walked wide around the hall. Suddenly there seemed to be people everywhere, narrow-faced Uplanders in their Uplander trews and jackets, fetching and carrying and busy and all of them staring at her.

  Three paces into the house, a single step went up to a wide spread of shining wood floor. The whole of home, house and yard together, would have space to grow in this room. Where? she thought and slid her eyes sideways, left, right. Where is he?

  Imp-face waited there, arms folded over her breasts. ‘Shoe!’

  Pin hoicked her skirts free of her ankles and showed her bare feet. Imp-face sniffed. She turned her head, her delicate mouth opened and she bawled, louder even than Mam, ‘Kisaaaah!’

&nb
sp; Kisa was a boy. A boy with a cloth and a bucket. A boy who knelt and washed Pin’s (rather grubby) feet, as if she were a lady. Pin felt her face burn hotter and hotter, and Imp-face just stood there breathing bad temper.

  ‘Now,’ said Imp-face. ‘You go. In, go on. Up!’

  Upstairs, doors led off a wide landing. Imp-face gestured her through one, into a room all chests: chests stacked against every wall, chests stood two high and back-to-back, making an aisle down the centre of the room.

  ‘All My Lady’s?’ said Pin.

  ‘All, all and My Lord and Young Master, Young My Lady. You.’ Imp-face caught one of Pin’s hands in hers. ‘Smooth,’ she said. ‘So no catch thread.’ She mimed a deep pulled thread. ‘Not so wet, no mark.’

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘So. Pretty, so. Pretty-hand working.’

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘This.’ She put a pot into Pin’s hands. ‘Keep soft hands. Smell good.’ She looked Pin up and down and sniffed.

  It was Pin’s task to fold and put away (with my pretty-hand-working pretty hard, she thought). To air and sort according to colour, fabric, occasion. To keep clean and dust- and moth-free. All as Uplanders did it. Even the folding had to be taught.

  ‘Left revers to left sleeve. So.’ Imp-face sat on her heels watching for mistakes. ‘Right revers over – so. Meets left. No, no! Not off cloth!’ Her fingers, like tiny gold sticks, flicked the fabric off the floor and onto the folding cloth; flicked stinging against Pin’s knuckles. Pin pulled the robe square and started again.

  The Uplanders laid floors on top of the floors: mats of straw woven stiff around a frame and padded with wool. Out of the great hall everyone took their footwear off and walked barefoot or beslippered on the mats. This was where they worked – she and Gerin, who folded for the Lord, and Lea Porritt from the village, who folded for the Lord’s children – all of them sitting on the mats, in the aisle between the chests, and Tse-tsa watching, watching every move they made. Tse-tsa was Imp-face (Pin thought it a bitty sort of name, but then she thought Tse-tsa a bitty sort of person), but Pin was not to call her that, was to call her Servant in Charge of Clothes Folding. She called Pin Clothes Folder. She sat on her crossed legs (in a way that had Pin’s numb in minutes) and snapped her orders, flicking her sharp little fingers, and glaring her sourness from her imp eyes.

  The Lady came with her women, all of them tall enough to make Pin feel short. Pin looked at her, looked past her, but Cam was not with her, no men were with her.

  ‘Lady Graceful. Head down!’ Tse-tsa tapped the side of Pin’s head. Pin bent her neck and looked at the floor, and that was what she saw of the Lady: her broad feet in spotless white stockings, not so much peeping from under her trouser hems as lumping, right out.

  ‘I did see My Lady today’ Pin told everyone at dinner. ‘She did come to see us.’

  ‘That Graceful Fenister?’ said Da.

  ‘She does seem very Uplander in her ways, her dress. Even speaking . . . her accent is like theirs.’

  ‘I do remember her being betrothed to Lord Ryuu’s son.’ Mam laughed. ‘She was very unhappy in it, but you’d not know it now.’

  ‘Maybe . . .’ said Pin, ‘. . . maybe she had to become Uplander, to be happy with the Lord.’

  ‘Maybe you do think people as soft in the head as you are,’ said Hughar.

  ‘Hughar,’ said Pin, ‘do you go stick your head in the pig bucket.’

  Last thing before she slept, she took the pot Tse-tsa had given her and rubbed her hands with cream. ‘Be good for nothing but clothes, do I keep on like this – lady hands, so.’ She waved them in the air, then capped the jar, smiled.

  ‘What is this?’ Pin showed a robe, peach and turquoise and poison-green, with a pattern painted on it. Clouds? she thought. With a fan inside?

  ‘Pine.’ Tse-tsa traced the outline of the pattern.

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘Pine is winter. Is green and warm-feeling, for winter cold.’

  ‘Aye. When I was a little one, I wanted a dress made of lettuce.’

  The little mouth pursed. ‘This pine.’

  ‘Tse-tsaaa.’ It was the boy Kisa. ‘Yaddle-yaddle-yaddle.’ His voice was all up and down like singing, and it pulled words into strange shapes. Pin liked it— Ah! Her knuckles stung. She looked up into Tse-tsa’s eyes.

  ‘I must-go. You stay. Fold.’

  Pin nodded. She folded very carefully, and very carefully listened to Tse-tsa going down the stairs. Pin put down the robe. She walked to the doorway and listened. There were the girls polishing the hall floor; she could smell the wax. There was the sound of pots from the kitchen, of men’s voices from the stable yard. She turned to Gerin and Lea. ‘I do just need to . . .’ She mimed the outhouse and stepped, bare feet not quite silent, into the hall and along it. Into one room and another, and another.

  These bare rooms. This gleaming lacquer that showed her face in every surface. She would rather plain wood about her. Not a stick of furniture, but for a low lacquered table that held a bowl, a cushion scratchy with gold embroidery. Empty. She could not tell if they were bedroom, sitting room or shrine. If Cam was living in one of these rooms, there was nothing of him for her to find. Suddenly her nerve failed her and she fled, feet drumming softly on the mats, back to the clothes room.

  When Tse-tsa came back she paused in the doorway, turned and looked up the hall. Pin felt a sudden lurching in her gut. Tse-tsa trit-trotted between the chests, ‘Show me your fold.’

  Pin wiped her hands on her skirt, not to mar the silk with sweat.

  ‘The titles they do use are strange,’ Pin said to Acton. ‘No Miss This or Master That. It’s all Clothes Folder, Lady in Waiting, Doorman. What’s wrong with a name, eh? And every pattern on every garment does all mean something. I don’t know that I’ll ever get it straight.’

  ‘What?’ said Acton. ‘Beaten by the Uplanders already?’

  ‘Pah!’ She shifted against him. ‘You do know, I’m learning their language. Cho, that is thank you.’

  ‘Sounds like cats fighting.’

  That made her laugh. ‘Umaye, that is you, and it is my love if you say it like this, Umaye.’

  ‘Umaye.’ Acton’s hand was warm on the nape of her neck. ‘Umaye.’ Kneeling, he shouldered her legs wider apart and kissed her, hair and sex and all, kissed and kissed her. Pin had her hands up against her mouth, biting at them to hold her sounds in. When the heat and rush faded, she looked up through the branches and said, ‘I see it, pine trees. Look, just like they do show them.’

  When she had been at the Big House a month, Pin judged it time enough. She asked Tse-tsa first. ‘Servant in Charge of Clothes Folding, I do want to speak to My Lady.’

  ‘Tssssss!’ said the Servant in Charge. ‘You want, tsss.’

  ‘About my brother.’

  ‘Fold.’ Her little fingers nipped Pin’s.

  ‘His name is Cam (Attling, as I am Pin Attling) and he did go to Dorn-Lannet when I was a small maid, to give his service to the Lord.’

  Tse-tsa’s face went all empty and cold-looking. She did not say anything, not another word, all morning. But when Pin went to her noon meal Tse-tsa said, ‘You eat, then you see My Lady.’

  Pin curtsied low. ‘Thank-you, Servant in Charge.’

  The Lady spent most of her time in the hall. Pin trailed Tse-tsa down the stairs, pad-padding on the mats. The hall doors were closed fast. Pin looked to the Servant in Charge – even snippy Tse-tsa was better than no one. But Tse-tsa only mimed opening the door, shooed her off with her hands. So Pin pushed the door open and stepped into the hall. Then Tse-tsa came in, when she could have come at Pin’s side and made it easier for her.

  ‘Pin,’ said My Lady. ‘Look at you! Aren’t you tall, and those eyes, black as night’s shadows. My dear, my new Clothes Folder. Look at her.’

  The Lord glanced up. Pin curtsied almost to the ground, and when no one said anything, stood up again. Lord Gyaar Ryuu was sitting on a settle – grander than Mam and Da
had, but a settle like any other Pin had seen before. There were the unending cushions piled anyhow all over it.

  ‘Pin?’ said one of the children.

  ‘Aye, Young Master.’ Pin looked around: at a bow-legged little table against the wall, a spinning wheel—

  ‘Young My Lord,’ hissed Tse-tsa.

  ‘Young My Lord.’

  ‘Uncle Vercamer’s sister,’ said the Lady.

  Uncle Vercamer? ‘Aye.’

  ‘Pin?’ said another child.

  ‘Appin, my dear.’ My Lady rolled Pin’s name about on her tongue. Her lovely low voice gave it a magic. ‘Her name is Appin.’

  ‘Uplander,’ said the Lord. ‘It is an Uplander name. Like your brother’s.’

  ‘I don’t know, My Lord. I’m sure there is nothing Uplander about me.’

  ‘Oh,’ said My Lady. ‘But there is.’

  And the Lord laughed.

  The moment was there. All she had to do was speak. I did wonder, My Lady. I did think to see my brother with you, here. And she could not, could not make herself bring the words out, and the moment passed, and her question was still to be asked.

  ‘My Pin,’ Da took to saying, ‘we never do see you now.’

  ‘They do keep me late at the Big House.’

  ‘Aye? Well, we do miss you.’

  ‘Oh, Da. You do see me every night and every morning.’

  At the Big House she said nothing more. She just left when her time was up each day and took the low road round the hillocks, to Acton, who waited at the waterhole.

  ‘You do know . . . I did think Cam would be among the household,’ Pin finally said, one day.

  ‘Ah.’ Acton lifted his head and looked at her, but the sunlight was behind him and she could not make out his expression. ‘You did lie to me,’ he said and pushed away from her.

  ‘Not lie, just not tell you all. We never do talk about him, at home. Not since he went. Like he was worse than dead. Mam and Da, they never do talk about him, and I could not, not to them.’