by Jay Lake
Federo leaned close and yelled something in my ear that I could not make out over the racket. I nodded as if I understood. The grip on my shoulder relaxed a trifle.
Soon enough the chaos sorted itself into a systematic ebb and flow. All the shouters had an intended audience. Everyone on deck knew who they were looking for. Gear was broken down and packed off quickly, hatches to the cargo holds thrown open, sailors told off for liberty with pay in their hands all in one swirling rush. Federo soon spotted his contact deep within the churn.
“Come!” he shouted.
Sailors carrying Federo’s gear surrounded us. With the aid of their muscles and fists, we pushed through the mob to a high-sided cart that waited on the cobbles at the head of the docks. Its surfaces were a deep, glossy red traced with gold striping and a small black design upon the door. The huge wheels were finished to match the body, with iron straps around their rims. A pair of large black animals, mad-eyed with trailing tails and flowing hair along their graceful necks, stamped in their traces under the watchful gaze of a man on a high bench at the front.
Federo opened the door and pushed me inside. He then slammed it shut to shout orders concerning the stowage of his gear. Several small windows admitted light, but the carriage was so tall, all I saw were rooftops, sky, and circling birds. I sat on a leather bench which was the softest thing I’d ever encountered in my life. Useless little buttons were set deep in the seat in a mockery of how I’d sewn my twice-lost bells. I picked at them and smelled the oils someone had used to polish the interior-lemon, and the pressings of some vegetable I didn’t know-until Federo returned.
He climbed in and took my hand with a firm squeeze. “We are almost there, girl.”
“I have a name,” I said sullenly. I must have still known it then.
His voice grew hard. “No, you do not. Not in this place. It is gone with your bells. Forward, always forward.”
As if responding to his words, the carriage lurched into motion. I could hear the coachman’s whip crack, the whistles and hup-hup-hups as he signaled his team, the curses as he shouted at the traffic. Soft as the seat was, the ride ran rougher than Fortune’s Flight even on stiff swells. Though Federo had told me of cobbles, I had never seen a stone road before that hour. The ride was miserable.
I stared at the passing rooftops and wondered if I should have thrown myself into the harbor after all.
We bounced past bright painted columns and burnished roofs and, once, a tree of copper and brass that overhung the road. I knew that if I climbed on my knees to stare outside, a parade of marvels would pass before my eyes. Later, I would wish very much that I had done so. In that moment, I merely wanted to go home.
The carriage passed through a large gate, then a smaller one, before finally creaking to a halt. Looking up through the windows, I could see walls all around us. The bulk of a large building loomed on one side, anchoring them. Walls and structure alike were made of a pale blue stone of a sort I had never seen. My entire village could have fit within this place.
Federo banged on the door. Someone opened it from the outside.
Our carriage could not be exited from inside, I realized. Caged again.
He stepped out and ushered me down. I saw the coachman climbing cautiously back onto his box. His eyes were now covered with a length of silk. That had not been true down at the docks.
This was a great puzzle.
Opposite the tall building was a low, wide structure of two storeys. The upper balcony provided deep shade for the lower floor. Its posts were carved with detailed scenes now overgrown with flowering vines. The second storey was roofed by more of the bright copper, backing up to the rise of the bluestone wall. A pomegranate tree grew out of a little circle of raised stone in the middle of the cobbled court. Somehow that lone, lonely tree reminded me of home.
Federo crouched to meet my eye level. “From here, you are among women. You have left the world to be in this place. I am the only man you will speak with, expect for the Factor himself, whenever he comes to see you. Use your head, little one.”
“I have a name,” I whispered once more in my words, thinking of Endurance’s bell.
He ruffled my hair. “Not until the Factor gives you one.”
My maggot man stepped back into the carriage and slammed the door behind him. The coachman cocked his head if listening, then drove his team very slowly around the pomegranate and through a narrow gate that shut behind him, pushed by unseen hands. The doors were some age-blackened wood, bound with iron and copper. They seemed as stout and unforgiving as the surrounding walls.
Though I saw no one, I heard throaty laughter.
“I am here,” I called out in my own words. Then I said it again in Federo’s words.
After a while, a woman not very much taller than I, but fat as any house duck, with protruding lips curved to match, waddled out from the shadowed porch. She was swathed in coarse black cloth that covered even her head. “So you’re the new one.” She used Federo’s words, of course. “I’ll have no more of that…”
The rest I did not understand. When I tried to ask what she meant, she slapped me hard upon the ear. I knew then that she intended me never to speak my own words. Just as Federo had warned me.
I resolved to learn her words so well that eventually this duck woman could never order me about again. I will clothe myself in bells , I thought proudly, and leave this place with my life in my own hands .
“I am Mistress Tirelle.” She didn’t look any less like a duck up close. Her lips stuck forward, and her two small eyes were so far apart, they threatened to sidle outward to her temples. She wore her black dowd like a badge of honor. I was never to see her clad in colors of any sort. Her thin hair was pulled back hard and thickened with some fiber, then painted black as a bosun’s boot.
She was a woman pretending to be a shadow pretending to be a woman.
Mistress Tirelle walked around me, stepping back and forth as she inspected. When I turned my gaze to watch, she grasped my chin hard and pulled it straight forward. “You never move without purpose, girl.”
I already knew there was no point in having that argument with this aging troll of a woman.
She leaned in close behind me. “You do not have purpose, girl, except what the Factor lends you. Or I in his place.” Her breath reeked of the northern herbs that had found their way into the stockpot aboard Fortune’s Flight -astringent without any decent heat to them, and strangely crisp, the smell gone half-sour from its journey through her mouth.
The woman continued to circle me. I remember this, like so much else in those days, through the lens of later understanding. In that first season, I was little taller than her waist, though by the time the end came between us, I could see the part in her hair without craning my neck. Somehow in memory I am both sizes at once: the small frightened girl whom Federo had spirited away from the fields of her home, and the angry gawk who fled those bluestone walls with cooling scrapings of a dead woman’s skin beneath her fingernails.
She was to be my first killing, at a time when I should already have known far better. I would have slain her that initial day, out of simple spiteful anger. It was the work of years to lacquer the nuances of a worthy, well-earned hatred over the fearful rage of the child I was.
Memory or no, I did not have any cutting answers for her. Federo had been too frank with me to awaken any sense of how words duel, and I suppose I was too young for a bladed tongue then. I stood while she circled me again and again. Her breath heaved like the steam kettle deep within the decks of Fortune’s Flight. Sweat sheened on her brow like rain on a millstone.
We had not moved from the spot in the courtyard where Federo had deposited me. No one was about-the possibility of hidden watchers would not occur to me for quite some time, and in the event proved false within the Factor’s cold, towering walls. I only had eyes for the withering pomegranate tree, occluded from moment to moment as she passed round me.
I startled when Mistr
ess Tirelle slipped a gleaming blade from some recess in her wrappings. She was ready for that, and slapped me again. “Soon I shall not be able to leave marks on you, girl, but for today discipline is my own. Even later there will be ways. You. Do. Not. Move.”
The duck woman stopped behind me. I shivered, wondering what she intended with that blade. Surely Federo had not brought me over an ocean just to be cut open like a sacrificial goat. The left shoulder of my shift fell away with a snick. Another snick, and the right was gone, the simple dress with it.
That was my first encounter with scissors, and they startled me. Being bare-skinned in this place with such a shy sun and chilly air was strange to me as well. Much as Federo had done, Mistress Tirelle began to prod my back, my shoulders, my hips. As she pushed and poked at me, she issued terse commands.
“Hold your right arm out straight, and do not drop it again.
“Let me see your teeth. All of them, girl.
“Bend. Now touch the courtyard. With your palms laid flat.”
The examination was not painful, but it was thorough. Finally she was in front of me again. “I don’t suppose that young fop bothered to read your bowels.”
“He di-,” I began, but was stopped with another slap.
“When I want you to answer me, I will address you as Girl, girl.”
Even then I could hear the word becoming a name. My own words spilled out of me. “I have a-”
This time the blow caused my ears to ring. “You will take ten minutes of standing with warm ashes in your mouth every time I hear a single word of that filthy dog’s tongue out of you, Girl.”
I nodded, tears pooling hard and bitter in my eyes.
Words, it all came down to words. Federo had bent my father’s will with words long before that little sack had passed between them to buy me away. These northern people were continuing to remake me with words.
Someday I would own their words.
Mistress Tirelle dragged me to the shaded porch and bade me stand by a post. A moment later she was back with a ladle filled with ashes. I choked spooning them into my mouth, but I resolved not to give her reason to beat me further. She seemed to take much joy in raising her hand against me. In this I would not please her.
So I stood weeping, my chest spasming with coughs I was desperate to swallow. I kept my eyes tight set against her, and my heart closed.
After a time, the duck woman put an empty bucket before me. “Spit,” she said. “And do not trail your peasant slime upon my floor.” Once that was done, to much gagging and heaving, she gave me a little mug of tepid water to wash my mouth out.
I wondered if she had ever been schooled to hold ashes in her mouth and take beatings at the slightest word.
“I believe we understand each other now,” Mistress Tirelle announced. “This is the Pomegranate Court, in the House of the Factor.” Those names were just strange words to me at the time, though I came to understand them soon enough. “You are the sole candidate in residence within this court. This is as it should be. These walls around us are your world. You will see no one that I do not bring you, speak to no one that I do not introduce first. You belong to me and your instructresses, until the Factor says otherwise.” Her face closed in a scowl. “Filthy little foreign chit that you are, I should not think you will ever be so lucky.”
She pointed to the bucket and the mug. “I will show you where to clean these. Then you will learn the rooms of your world. Do you understand me, Girl?”
“Yes, Mistress Tirelle.” My tone gave no ground, but it made no assault on her dignity either.
We went first to the kitchen of the Pomegranate Court.
Much later I came to understand that all the courts in the Factor’s house are named for their tree. In a few cases, the tree-that-was. Whether Pomegranate, Peach, or Northern Maple, each court was substantially the same. I lived in a factory, after all, dedicated to the very slow and delicate process of manufacturing a certain kind of woman, run by ruthless termagants only too willing to find fault and cast a candidate aside like a badly thrown pot.
The ground floor of the building that housed the rooms of my little court was laid out simply enough. A kitchen stood at the eastmost end. Several huts the size of Papa’s could have fit within. It held ovens of three different types, two hearths, and an assortment of smaller fire vessels. Great blocks of cured wood, smooth-sanded stone, and a strangely porous ceramic stood awaiting use. Pans, pots, and cooking tools in a bewildering array of shapes and sizes hung from the high ceilings or along the walls next to bins for grains, roots, and produce. Basins waited for rinsing and washing. There was even a great box half-filled with ice.
The only thing missing was knives. I’d learned aboard ship that no cook is ever without a good blade, but whoever cooked here did their work with unaccustomed bluntness, or took their tools with them.
Though Mistress Tirelle gave me time to fill my eyes, I did not ask questions. She had not spoken to me, after all.
Some lessons are not so hard to learn.
Next to the kitchen was a dining room. A long table polished to the same sheen as Federo’s carriage was surrounded by spindly chairs that did not look strong enough to hold me, let alone adults. Where the kitchen’s walls had been brick and tile against the danger of sparks, here they were covered with a bellied cloth of pale amber shot through with gold thread. This room had been painted by someone with a very delicate hand. Birds were rendered in full detail smaller than the nail of my thumb by the application of two or three strokes. Where their eyes could be seen in their pose, some green stone had been affixed to the cloth in fragments smaller than a sesame seed.
These birds swarmed in a flock of hundreds around a stand of trees that I took to be willows. Each leaf and twig on the willows had been painted as well. A stream wound among them just above the low cabinets that lined the room. Bright fish and reeds and little flowers spun on its current.
I know now that those walls had been a lifetime’s work for some artist bound to the Factor’s will. All I knew then was that they looked so real that I might step within them.
For a moment, I longed to do so. The flight of the painted birds seemed beautiful and free. But I knew even at that first part of my life in Copper Downs that someday I would leave this room. Those birds were trapped forever in their moment of time, rendered immortal but static against the cloth of the walls.
Already Mistress Tirelle pushed me onward. My leaving was not someday, but in that moment.
The central room of the ground floor opened to the courtyard beyond. Hidden folded panels could be fitted in place at need depending on the weather, but otherwise the room’s low seats and padded benches were subject to whatever noise and wind stirred without. A hearth backed this room as well, while the walls were lined with frames and stands representing the tools of various arts. A rack of scrolls and books and bound sheaves of vellum and parchment stood on the west end, a door open in the midst of the shelving.
Still without words, Mistress Tirelle forced me on through.
The last room on the ground level was windowless just as the dining room had been. These walls were padded with a much coarser cloth. The floors were covered with tight-woven straw. No furniture was present except for a low wooden bench that seemed to have been abandoned on a whim. It did not fit the sense of purpose that coiled invisible but strong in the rest of this place.
“Outside, Girl,” Mistress Tirelle growled. I marched a quick step ahead of her fist, until she caught me across my still-bare shoulders. “Do not walk so-it is undignified.”
I bit back a reply. We were on the porch now, in the deep shadows beneath the columned ceiling that was the balcony above.
Mistress Tirelle turned me to face her with a bruising grip on my shoulder. “You will never be in these rooms I have shown you except as part of a lesson. Some Mistress will be with you at all times down the stairs. Do not descend to practice, or seek a lost scarf, or any other excuse which ever enters you
r foolish head.” She pointed to the end of the porch just outside the empty room. “We go up now. That is where you will sleep, and bathe, and take meals unless you have been brought down here.”
I stared at her, round-eyed and silent.
“You have leave to ask a question, Girl.”
“No, thank you,” I said. Not a question, and so I had pushed past the letter of her word.
She did not strike me for that. So there are limits to her limits . I made careful note of this discovery on the secret list that was already forming deep within me.
Upstairs the rooms were far plainer, though still pleasant and well-appointed beyond anything I might ever have imagined back in Papa’s hut. Neither Federo’s room at the wayhouse nor our cabin on Fortune’s Flight had approached this simple comfort and well-wrought craft.
The deep porch formed a wide balcony, with a few chairs and a table of woven cane and whip-thin wood. All these second-storey rooms opened outward rather than connecting within as below.
A smaller kitchen above the great one would still have served to feed our entire village at home. Walls and floor alike were tiled with ceramic squares painted in the pattern of a lion devouring a snake, which in turn devoured the next lion beyond, and so forth.
The eating room was dominated by a large but simple table polished smooth as the mirrored gloss of the great table downstairs. Instead of the unnaturally detailed silk, these walls were wood that had been washed over with a pale color.
Beside that was a sitting room with a few wooden chairs and small tables, and a smaller hearth than the receiving room downstairs. The two rooms past were sleeping rooms, the one for Mistress Tirelle next to the stairs. I had no doubt she slept with the ears of a bat.
The high-walled courtyard, the baths in a cellar below the great kitchen, a double handful of rooms, and the struggling pomegranate tree were the entirety of my world for a very long time to come. All of it ruled by Mistress Tirelle.