Califia's Daughters

by Leigh Richards

  No introductions were made, of course. The horse race talk evolved into ribald speculations concerning the sex life of the jockeys. Five skeins of thread were laid out on the table. The man continued to rummage through the others in a desultory manner, as if he, too, had only half a mind on the business at hand but was for some reason loath to let it go. He did not look again at Dian or the baby but held Deirdre’s attention with details that even Dian could tell were needless, and when Dian realized what he was doing her mild irritation boiled over.

  This bastard was not in the least interested in talking about yarn samples; he wanted only to manipulate the three females into a state of complete frustration, for his own entertainment. She stood up abruptly and, at the looks on their faces, knew she had overreacted; well, the hell with it. She smiled what felt like a snarl and jiggled the startled Willa.

  “I am terribly sorry,” she said to the man. “The child is hungry and seems to be interfering with your discussion. Perhaps I ought to remove her, so you can finish without interruption.” It was a hint not even he could ignore, but she was not prepared for the twist he put on it.

  “By no means. If the child is hungry, let it eat,” he said, and waved regally toward Deirdre and sat back in his chair.

  From the look on her face Deirdre had not actually lived with men for a long time, and nursing a baby around strange males was an unfamiliar, and not entirely comfortable, experience. Nonetheless, after an initial hesitation she reached gamely for the baby and set about putting the strange armful to her breast under the gaze of three absorbed sets of eyes. Eventually, after what seemed a long time, Willa was suckling.

  “I thought yours were older than that,” commented the oldest man. Deirdre looked up.

  “Oh, this one isn’t mine,” she said. “I’m just helping out until this woman can find a wet nurse.”

  “Why?” interrupted the man in green. “What’s wrong with her?” He nodded at Dian, who caught his eye and held it.

  “Not that it is any business of yours,” she answered deliberately, “but the child is not mine either. I found her, abandoned, at a crossroads. Exposed.” The young man jerked upright, started to rise, caught himself, and looked apprehensively at the nursing pair. The man with the diamond ring had no such compunctions, or pride; he was already on the other side of the room with his hand on the doorknob.

  “What’s wrong with her?” the young man again demanded.

  “Absolutely nothing,” Dian answered blandly. “Just an extra toe or two.”

  The man’s eyes went to Willa, as if he half-expected an octopus’s tentacles to squirm out from the wrappings, but he relaxed slightly in his chair. However, the man at the door would have none of it.

  “Come on, Hari, it’s time to go. We said we’d be back by one.”

  The younger man stood up in agreement.

  “Daren’s right, Hari, and I’ve got things to do before the party. Let’s go.”

  “I’m not finished,” the oldest man said flatly, but Deirdre spoke up, hesitantly.

  “Really, Hari, there’s not an awful lot more to do right now,” she said. “I’ll work up a sample with these colors, and after that you can tell me what you think. But that’s going to take me at least two weeks. I’m grateful you could come down and see me.” It was as close to a dismissal as Deirdre was capable of giving, and although Hari did not like it, Dian could see him decide that it was better to accept with grace rather than make a scene. He stood up, nodded to Deirdre, and swept out without further acknowledgment of Dian or the baby.

  The door shut behind the men, and Deirdre blew out a sigh of relief. She shook her head ruefully at Dian.

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “The family is one of my better customers, but there are times when I wonder if they’re worth it.”

  “I hope I haven’t chased them away permanently.”

  “Don’t worry, they’re not that easily put off. Sad, really, all that energy and money, and being men they have nothing to do all day but indulge themselves. Hari’s really very clever with colors, he does a lot of designing. He’s all right. In small doses. Sit down,” she added, and, “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “No, thanks, I had something a little while ago. Do you mind if I take a look at the workshop?”

  “Not at all. Here, I’ll come with you, just let me switch her over—what’s her name?”

  “Willa.”

  “Willa, that’s right. Little ones like this are so easy to handle, once they get the hang of it.” And so saying she tucked the child more firmly against her body, straightened her dress, and led Dian out of the office space and into the workshop. It was a bright, noisy space, with seven or eight women, two of them slim brown-skinned figures dressed in the brilliant wraps Dian thought were called saris. All of them were talking happily over the clatter of their looms while half a dozen children played around their feet.

  “Which one is yours?” she asked, nodding at the pile of multicolored kids.

  “None of that crew. Mine are taking a nap—they’re twins, fifteen months and all mischief, but thank God they’re good sleepers. Do you weave?”

  Dian was grateful the woman had not asked, Do you have children?

  “No, but I have a sister-in-law who does beautiful work. She’d love this.”

  “This is the lighter stuff in here, for curtains and upholstery to go with the carpets. My part’s through here,” and she ducked through a draped doorway into a smaller shed behind the main one. Five huge frames held works in progress, and three women looked up at their entrance, their flying fingers not even pausing. A fourth woman knelt on the floor atop three hundred square feet of spectacular, sinuous gold and scarlet dragon on a rippling background of blues and greens, a pair of sculpting shears in her hand. Dian went to stare at the carpet and make noises of unfeigned appreciation. Deirdre brushed them aside.

  “It’s all right. Nothing very challenging, aside from the size, but they tend to like traditional designs in Meijing. Boring, but it pays the rent.”

  “How much would something like that cost? If that isn’t—”

  Deirdre casually named a sum that made Dian blink and clear her throat.

  “And a small one, maybe by one of your apprentices?”

  “For you?”

  “A gift. For a man.”

  “What kind of thing does he like?”

  Dian was at a loss.

  “I don’t really know. I mean, he likes the sorts of colors you were laying out for those gentlemen, but he hasn’t been around—been with us—very long. He’s quiet. Funny. Strong. He likes waterfalls,” she offered a bit desperately, and Deirdre laughed.

  “A strong man who likes waterfalls. That should be fun,” and then she paused and her dark eyes began to focus far away. “I wonder,” she said, and a minute later, “That might do it,” and still later she dragged herself back and smiled absently at Dian. “I was going to do a small sampler for Hari, perhaps I’ll do an actual carpet instead that would do for your—what’s his name?”

  “Isaac. His name is Isaac. I could pick it up in six weeks or so, if you’ve got it finished—I’ll be coming back through around then. Or if not, maybe next spring, someone from my family will be coming up then.”

  “Six weeks should be good. Isaac, you say. And waterfalls. Hmmm.”

  Ten minutes later Deirdre put Willa back in Dian’s hands and waved away her thanks. When Dian turned in the doorway, Deirdre was already bent over a large sheet of paper on the worktable, a bristling cup of colored pencils pulled up in front of her.

  Dian’s last stop before reaching Meijing gleamed at her from several miles down the Road, a dazzling white-walled hacienda atop the last set of hills before the city. Three hours after leaving Deirdre’s shop, she turned Simon’s head to follow the insignificant signs pointing to cantina and entered a maze of alleyways that stepped and twisted and finally fell away respectfully a distance from the inn’s perimeter wall, whitewashe
d and laid with a businesslike icing of broken glass and wire along the top. She dismounted and led Simon through the massive black gates. Once inside they were pounced upon by a silent brown child who looked remarkably like a miniature Carmen; she tugged at the reins until Dian relinquished them.

  “I’m not staying,” she told the child. “I’ll be here less than an hour. Yo estaré aqui menos que una hora,” she called, shrugged, and sent Culum and Tomas off after them. The woman who appeared from the inn’s doorway sent a rapid fire of choppy syllables rattling against the back of the retreating child, who merely hunched her shoulders another fraction of an inch and continued walking. The woman, all squat browns and blacks, looked a question at Dian.

  “My name is Dian,” she started, but got no further. The woman bundled her inside, conjured up another of herself, twenty years younger and forty pounds lighter, who tugged the baby, carrier and all, from Dian’s arms with the same single-mindedness that the stable girl had shown, bustling off again into the dim and fragrant depths of the inn. Dian’s flustering guide completely ignored Dian’s attempts at both Spanish and English but shooed Dian ahead of her through half an acre of glossy red-brown tile floors, massive black beams, and rough, spotless white plaster walls.

  At the end of their travels the innkeeper, or her representative, shoved Dian out into a courtyard, a huge sun-washed area broken into intimacy by a number of half-walls, four enormous spreading oak trees, and a meandering and apparently unplanned watercourse with three ponds, a dozen changes of level, and a soothing trickle of water from the wall to mark its beginning. There were two cooking pits, each large enough for half a cow, half a dozen potbellied clay fireplaces, strings of colorful hanging lamps waiting for night, countless flowerpots blazing with marigolds and zinnias and asters, four large bamboo cages of songbirds, a pair of somnolent orange cats, and an incomparable view of the walls of Meijing, that massive silver snake that rode the hilltops and protected the last city in the West from overview. Dian was the only human being in sight.

  She walked aimlessly around the courtyard, admired the view and the goldfish in the ponds and the birds in the cages, and had settled into a disconsolate chair to await Willa’s return when the door from the cantina burst open and a third black-clad, tightly bunned woman stormed out with a red-enameled tray laden with a large bowl of crisp brown corn chips, three smaller bowls containing dips, and a large blue-glass pitcher filled with a dark brown liquid topped by a thin layer of finely textured froth. She dumped the tray in front of Dian, miraculously not spilling a drop from bowl or pitcher, seized the jug, and paused.

  “Bebe Usted cerveza?”

  “Sí, señora, con mucho gusto.”

  The woman nodded brusquely and dashed the liquid into a tall, narrow blue glass, slapped the pitcher down, and stalked off. The seemingly careless service had resulted in a precise measure of beer with a head of caramel-colored foam that blossomed one half inch above the glass, then subsided without so much as a dribble. It was a beautiful beer, cool and heavy and sweet against the warm, salty chips and the fire of the thin red-brown dip, the tang of the lumpy red one, and the creamy rich garlic of the green one.

  All in all, Dian was well satisfied with what she took to be her dinner. Then the other trays arrived. Three of them, carried by three more women (no, surely not three more of these phlegmatic Hispanics?), who marched across the red tiles and dealt out bowls, plates, and baskets with a verve that should have sent each object spinning to the ground but somehow did not. Dian tried to dredge up some appropriately appreciative phrases, but was not fast enough off the mark and could only fling various forms of gracias at the black backs.

  Bowls of beans and rice, succulent prawns in a piquante sauce and chicken mole, the chocolate sauce so thick it swallowed the chicken, and flaming chile verde, along with a basket of fresh hot tortillas, a platter of flautas topped with sour crema, a plate of tamales, and—Dian groaned, knowing she could never eat it all, and knowing she was going to make herself ill trying. The sun inched across the tiles, the shadows grew long, and finally Dian sat back, stunned and pop-eyed and incapable of movement. She rested her head against the convenient chair back, and in two minutes she was asleep.

  She woke to find a cat in her lap and the sun in her eyes and the table as clear as if the feast had been but a fairy dream. Except for her stomach’s evidence—she felt like Judith had looked last month. She pried the disgusted cat from her thighs, got to her feet, and went to find Willa.

  There were people in the inn now, perhaps a dozen figures scattered across one corner, as dark and quiet as the rooms themselves. Dian waited for a brusque figure to materialize, and as her eyes adjusted to the low light she realized that three of the seven people sitting at the large corner table, drinking cerveza and eating tortilla chips with satisfied, tired movements and low voices, were men, and that the other six women, sitting at three surrounding tables, were guards, their eyes on Dian and their still hands hidden beneath the tables. Dian nodded easily to them and walked off at an oblique angle toward the kitchen smells.

  Before she could lay a hand on the doors, they flew open and there stood the first of the black-gowned women, framed by a square of light and an almost tangible air of chilis and grilling tortillas and voices. She had Willa in her hands and thrust her out, carrier and all, toward Dian. Willa had been out of the carrier, though, Dian noted as she buckled it on: the baby was now wearing an allover shapeless garment of scarlet cloth with a flock of tiny, bright-colored birds in flight across the sleeves and down the front. She exclaimed over it, received no reaction from the authoritative figure standing arms akimbo before her, and was seized by a flare of irritation.

  “I would like to say thank you to whoever fed Willa,” she said firmly.

  “No es necesario.”

  “Para Usted, señora, no es, pero para mí, y para este bebé, y”—she pulled out her trump card— “para mi amiga Jamilla, sí, es necesario.” Her Spanish was that of a child, Dian knew, but the message was unmistakable: kindly move out of my way, old woman, before you piss me off. The woman wavered, took half a step back into the busy kitchen, and halted again as the sound of a child’s wordless voice rose above the babble. Dian relented slightly.

  “Por favor, señora, my mother raised me to have good manners, and she would be upset if I walked away without saying gracias to the woman who gave this baby suck.” As Dian had suspected, the woman’s English was up to this, because in a moment she nodded shortly, gestured Dian to stay put, and leaned back to shriek into the kitchen. Voices cut off, pans stilled, and a beautiful young woman, almost a girl, came to the doorway wiping her hands on a towel. The señora assaulted her with a string of words unintelligible to Dian, and they both turned to look at Dian, one suspicious and the other smiling happily.

  “I was happy to help you, señora,” she said to Dian. “It is a pretty child, although the toes, they make my grandmother worried.”

  “They make me worried too,” Dian told her, “though probably for different reasons. I appreciate your willingness to have her in your house. And for the red suit. Can I return it . . . ?”

  “Oh, no, it is not new, my . . . my child has grown out of it.” Dian interpreted the hesitation in light of the grandmother’s obvious reluctance to have her in the kitchen and the sounds of the child on the other side of the door.

  “You have a son?” The grandmother made as if to push Dian out the front door of the inn, but the young woman only dimpled.

  “Yes. He is almost two. I have a picture,” she said, and fished a much-handled photograph of a sturdy child from the pocket of her apron. The subject of the studio portrait shouted loudly twenty feet away, but Dian would not have asked to see him for the world. She admired the image (thinking privately that the bright pink tinting on the child’s cheeks made him look like a doll) and thanked the women again before taking her leave.

  The stable girl was there waiting with Simon and the two dogs, perched on the edge
of a hitching rail with the reins in her hands, communing with Simon and completely oblivious of the dogs. She seemed reluctant to give over possession of the horse, ignored the coin Dian held out to her, and slouched off to await her next equine visitor. It was as well, Dian thought to herself as she checked the girth and mounted, that some people’s passions were fulfilled by their environment.

  “TELL THEM A FOREIGN DAMSEL WISHES TO SEE THEM;

  AND ASK THEM IF THEY WANT TO SEE ME

  INSIDE OR HERE WHERE I AM.”

  SIXTEEN

  ALL AFTERNOON THE FOG HAD BEEN SPILLING OVER THE tops of the hills from the sea, soft waves that dissipated before they reached the ground. Now, however, the sun’s heat was no longer enough to keep it at bay, and it was tumbling over the top of Meijing’s walls like an immensely slow tidal wave.

  The wave broke over the travelers a mile from the city gates, and the world closed in, clammy and dim. In the half-light the city walls lost their glow and were only gray and very solid. At the city’s gates, streamers of fog blew across the huge archway and gave for a brief instant the impression that the city itself was sailing briskly through a stationary cloud.

  Dian rode through the gates and dismounted inside the courtyard, which was even more enormous than she remembered, its farthest reaches only a series of glowing lights through the damp. The courtyard functioned as between territory, separated from the interior by the same sheer, high, windowless walls that the city presented to the rest of the world. A person in the Court of Traders might be technically within Meijing’s walls, but she was emphatically not within the city.

  The courtyard was emptying rapidly in the early dusk; most of the smaller stalls were already boarded and padlocked. The Approvals building here was the great-grandmother of the individual units along the Road, an eight-hundred-foot line of interconnected cubicles, no more than twenty feet deep and studded by dozens of evenly spaced doors alternating with windows. Both ends of the building were dark, but toward the middle quite a few of the cubicles were still fully lit and bustling with desperate energy as the soon-to-be-benighted traders hurried to have their last-minute purchases weighed, tested, and analyzed by the technicians and their gleaming, mysterious array of equipment.