by Jay Lake
Her words were a scrap of hope fed to a starving girl. “Yes, Mistress,” I muttered, then pulled away from the fur and cotton of her shoulder. “What is it you are here to teach me, please?”
She looked surprised. “Why, dancing, of course.”
We danced awhile.
I could not see how to make another belled silk and keep it a secret. Instead I began sewing one in my imagination. Each night before I slept, I would count the bells of my life to date. First there were the simple tin bells of my time with Papa. Then there were the scrap iron bits of my voyage with Federo. Then there were the pomegranate seeds of my months in this house.
In my mind they all rang, even the wood and iron bits. Each night after I had counted them all to the best of my recollection-some spans of days I had to guess at-I would make a game of sewing another one on. Because it was only in my head, I could use needles of bone or ivory, steel or wood; likewise the thread was as I decided it was.
The important thing was to keep the count. In the Pomegranate Court, weeks were marked by the pattern of daily lessons, and by the delivery of certain foodstuffs. We kept no calendars. The count of my bells was the count of my days, and how else would my spirit know the way home when I was done with my life?
I never breathed a word, said nothing to anyone, even the Dancing Mistress. I could not do this thing without punishment falling so hard upon my shoulders that I would bleed rivers.
Even so, she was a hidden friend to me through the darkest days of my second winter and the wet, gloomy opening of the spring that followed. The one hour of any day where I could speak even the least portion of my mind was in the practice room with her. We worked on steps, balance, how I walked, my sense of my body and the space it filled. Sometimes it was truly dance, but more often it was just movement.
“Most people think of their bodies as being flat, like a drawing of themselves,” she told me. “Imagine that you made a paper poppet, and moved it about on a little stage. Except it’s not at all true. You have depth. Your heels and elbows swing back. When you turn, there is a curve your body fills in the space around you.”
While the words made sense to me, it was hard to understand the idea that lay beneath. She set me to skipping rope-a pastime of which I had never heard-first forward, then backwards. To hop as the rope came down behind me required that I know without looking where both the rope and my feet were.
This was much like Mistress Tirelle making me pick fruit with a single glance, or Mistress Leonie’s endless tutelage on the niceties of seams. I had to see beyond what lay before my most casual gaze, to what was really there, as invisible to the eye as my own back was.
These lessons were strange, and quiet, but soon enough I could feel the grace they lent me. I could catch a dropped knife in the kitchen before it struck the tile, leap down the stairs from the balcony to the lower porch. I found I was strong, too. Very strong, the Dancing Mistress told me-more even than most boys. How was I to know? She helped me learn to use that advantage as well. Once the weather cleared a bit, I was able to climb the pomegranate tree speedily and without fear.
For that feat I was beaten so hard, I could not walk for two days. Mistress Tirelle and the Dancing Mistress had an argument, the only one I ever heard between them. Then the duck woman came waddling into my sleeping room. “This is your place,” she said quietly. “Do not look over the walls, do not peek out the gate.”
I forgot myself again and blurted out, “What is beyond, that I should fear it so?”
Mistress Tirelle pretended not to notice my infraction. “A world you will see when it is your time. Girl, you are being made ready for greatness. Let that making unfold in the way your teachers know best.”
Like Federo, she believed my being here was for the good of all. How could they think such a thing?
Spring became summer, the rhythms of the seasons continuing to mark my time in the Pomegranate Court. All I remembered from my earliest days was the endless heat and the sun pouring like a golden hammer upon the land. Here the heavens were a clock, a slow march of the long now following the course of plowing, planting, harvest, and fallow.
Not that I’d seen agriculture. Only my one pomegranate tree carrying its hidden burden of seeds, now lost like my bells, but far more likely to return. Once the art of reading had settled into my head, Mistress Danae showed me ever more books. Among them was a treatise on farming, The New Horse-Houghing Husbandry. This was the first truly old text I’d read. The book took me weeks on end to puzzle through, and I understood perhaps only one part in five.
Still, I had been born into the practice of farming. Papa and Endurance worked the paddies, brought in the rice, trod the husks. I recognized some of what Tullius, the author of this book, was describing. My interest was born of that-an echo of the familiar, mixed with stories of princes and battles and demigods and the colors of the world.
The other thing I learned from Husbandry was that the very speech of people could change over time. There were seasons to language, just as there were seasons to the years or to the lives of women. I went about for a while muttering in archaic Petraean, though I never had the nerve to answer Mistress Tirelle or my other instructresses in that form.
My lessons moved downstairs as well. We began cooking in the great kitchen more often. The selection of vessels, utensils, spices, and cooking methods was much more varied than upstairs. Mistress Tirelle and I broke our fasts there almost all the time. Some days we also took quick, simple midday or evening meals there. More to the point, downstairs was where I explored what could be done with food. The lessons were simple at first, but it was already clear to me that there might be no end to them if someone had the means to spend their lives in a glorious kitchen.
One day we were washing earth pears-small wrinkled lumps with purplish skins and hair-fine roots branching off them.
“This root must be cooked over a hot fire or on a high boil for at least ten minutes,” Mistress Tirelle said.
Nothing was ever written down. I was simply expected to remember. The array of details in the kitchen was staggering.
I clasped my hands briefly. This was how I indicated I wished to ask a question regarding whatever lesson was under way.
“You may speak, Girl.”
“What will happen if it is eaten raw, or poorly cooked?”
She gave me a long look. “A person could become quite ill, or even perish.”
It had never occurred to me that food could be a weapon. “So the earth pear is harmful?”
Mistress Tirelle put down her root and dried her hands. “Girl, your question runs ahead of your learning, but I will answer it nonetheless. Everything can do harm. The oils we use for frying would ruin your digestion if drunk down like wine. If I made you eat salt until you gorged, you would die of thirst soon after. Some herbs, or things that resemble herbs, can kill even as a small pinch of powder.”
“Then this art is like all the others I study.” I waved the earth pear in my hand to point around the great kitchen. “It is not that I should cook. It is that I should know cooking so well that I can see when someone is trying to poison me with salt or bad oils or the powder of killing herbs.”
Mistress Tirelle’s ghost of a smile briefly returned. “Federo chose you well, Girl.”
I looked down at my earth pear and wondered how I might feed it to her. Words, I reminded myself. You will triumph with words.
The lesson was clear: Anything could harm, if used in a certain way. Food. Words. A length of silk sewn into a tube and filled with sand. Even a person.
Are they training me to live well? Or to know different ways to kill and to die?
My lessons changed as the seasons did, along with the lengthening of my legs. Mistress Balnea brought the promised horse into the courtyard one day, and we began the study of the living animal instead of the illustrated scrolls and parchments. Our example was an old brown mare with a white blaze on her head who stared at me with empty eyes and suffered
herself to be touched and poked and prodded. I was given to understand that in time I would be permitted to mount and ride, as if this were some great treat. At times she brought a dog instead, different breeds on different days, and pointed up their skills and purposes, what their requirements were, and the conformation of their bodies. The dogs had more spirit than the broken old mare, but they also seemed easily cowed.
So, too, other teachings changed. A great loom was delivered and set up overnight beneath the pomegranate tree, with a dyed canvas sheet for shelter from the rain. Mistress Leonie began to teach me the more commercial aspects of weaving. A whole pig carcass arrived, which Mistress Tirelle and I spent three days butchering so I could see where on the animal’s body each cut of meat came from. Some we cured; some we cooked. Much went to waste.
Whatever they truly meant to make of me, I became increasingly aware of the substantial investment of time and resources the Factor was lavishing on my education.
The best change in lessons came, as I might have hoped, from the Dancing Mistress. She arrived one evening after dinner, not her usual schedule. Mistress Tirelle’s habit at that time was to have me read or practice my calligraphy in the last hours. She would then retire early. Thus I was surprised to see any of my instructresses at such an hour-especially the silver-furred woman.
“Come outside, Girl,” the Dancing Mistress said to me from my doorway. Behind her, Mistress Tirelle made some grumbling huff at the bottom of her breath. Judging by the look that passed between them, this argument had already been waged and lost.
In the courtyard, the moon spilled careless light on the cobbles. The newest shoots on the twigs of the pomegranate tree were silver-dark, while the shadows seemed to breathe ink. We stood awhile under the cold stars, exchanging no words.
That, I was happy enough to do. Every moment of my life was ruled by a guided watchfulness. Sharing the airy silence with the only friend I had was a goodness.
“You climbed well,” the Dancing Mistress said. “This pleases me.”
I clasped my hands.
Her voice deepened with sadness. “You are free to speak while we are at this lesson.”
“Mistress, I enjoyed the climb.”
“Good. Would you do it again, by moonlight?”
“When the tree is dark?” How hard could it be to find my way up? I was still quite small then, and had little fear of fitting my body anywhere I was permitted to go in the first place.
“Your friend the moon will provide hints to your eyes, Girl.”
I wore nothing but a shift, under a rough woolen wrap I’d woven for myself. My hands and feet were bare.
Up I went. The memory of my prior climb was strong. The tree’s bark was knotted and twisted to welcome my fingers. The branches alternated, so I could reach them like the rungs of a ladder.
Climbing was a joy. This was as close as I’d come to freedom since first walking away from the sound of Endurance’s bell with Federo’s hand clasped firmly around my own. No wonder Mistress Tirelle had so violently disapproved of climbing. My spirit soared with the lifting of my body, and the ancient moon was my oldest friend.
If the tree were tall enough, towering over the whole city of Copper Downs, could I see all the way home to Papa’s fire and the whuffling breath of the ox?
The upper branches were light and thin. They swayed even beneath my then-small weight. I could see the roof of the Pomegranate Court, the copper sheaths that kept the rain off my head, gleaming back at the moon. The bluestone walls were topped with a wide, flat walkway that I could not see from the ground. A place for soldiers to tread upon their watch, I realized, thinking back on all the battle poetry Mistress Danae had read to me. At least, if this house were in need of soldiers. Rooftops poked beyond, hinting at the city I’d seen so briefly on arriving in the harbor, and had been hidden away from ever since.
I turned and looked the other way. The taller inner wall of our courtyard was more clearly seen as a tower. Other treetops were visible in the other courts I had glimpsed before. For a long, strange moment I wondered if other Girls had been set to climb this night, if I would meet the eyes of my rival slaves over the rims of the walls set to keep us isolate and inviolate.
The Dancing Mistress had not asked me to move with speed, and so I did not return right away. Instead I looked down at the canvas that covered the loom, at the chest where the gear for the horses and dogs was kept, at the gatehouse marking the path to freedom.
Mine was a tiny, tiny world, but still far richer than the frog-filled ditches of Papa’s farm. I had no word for farm in my own language-where we lived was where we lived. I would not have learned to read, or anything of arithmetic, or the finer arts of cooking with all the poisons of the world, if I had stayed there.
I would not have been a slave if I had not come here.
“No one will own me,” I said in my own words.
The climb down was more difficult than the climb up had been. I picked my way with care and still slid twice, before falling the last ten feet and just barely missing the loom’s canvas. Still, I landed upright and kept my stance.
The Dancing Mistress stared at me, her eyes hooded by shadow. “What did you see up there?”
I opened my mouth, then stopped. She did not want a report on the copper roof of my house. What had I seen? I wondered. I blurted the deeper answer as it came to me, without further thought. “The path to freedom.”
“Hold that in your heart. I cannot release you from this place, but together we can visit freedom.”
I longed to ask her how, but the patience that had been beaten into me was a lesson well-learned.
“Now you will run about the courtyard as fast as you can go,” she said.
“For how long?”
“Until I tell you to stop, or your legs slip from beneath you.”
Eventually I went back inside with my shoulders aching and my mind racing.
I had trouble walking again the day after that first run, though I was pleased this time rather than humiliated. The pain had been earned. There was no cruelty. Just honest effort. The Dancing Mistress told Mistress Tirelle that I had bruised myself practicing cross-steps.
Federo came again that day. He was afoot instead of ahorse this time, and appeared wrung out. The sea had stained his clothes so that his velvet finery was ragged, while the sun had colored his skin so he less resembled a maggot and more a ripening berry.
He found me in the courtyard with Mistress Leonie and the loom. She excused herself as soon as she noticed Federo and went in search of Mistress Tirelle, or so I presumed. He sat on her little padded bench and stared at me awhile.
I offered him the small smile that was all I ever let out.
“How is it with you, Girl?” he finally asked.
“I learn.”
“Good.” Federo reached out and took up my hand. He turned it back and forth, looking first at my wrist then my fingers, at my palm then the back. “Do you learn well?”
“Some lessons are harder than others.”
“Which of the Mistresses do you favor most?”
A real smile escaped for a moment. “The Dancing Mistress.”
His smile answered. “Good.”
“I have a question.” I had not yet found the nerve to broach this one to her.
“You may ask it,” Federo said formally.
“Why do all my Mistresses have names save her? She has only a title.” And not a squarely accurate one, I thought.
“A fair question.” He tilted his head slightly. I could see a bloom of blood marring one eye, as if his face had recently been struck. “Her people are a race of few numbers, scattered far. The pardines do not give their names away even to each other. It is their way, what they call the paths of their souls, to keep their true selves hidden. It is said those selves are so deep that they survive braided among the soulpaths of other pardines long after the death of the body.” He shrugged. “In any event, whatever the state of their souls, some hav
e titles. Others might be called by the color of their eyes or their favored food.”
“I do not have a name.” Though I did once. “Yet my true self is not hidden at all. These Mistresses stare at every aspect of me all the time. They are remaking me by inches and days.”
The last of his pleasure fled as a bird before a storm. “It is not a lesson to be taken. Your circumstances and hers are as different as the stars are from the lamps of your house.”
“Both light the night.”
He touched my hair a moment. “Never forget who you are.”
“I am not yours,” I said in the language of my birth.
“Silence is your friend,” he answered in the same words.
I watched him walk slowly into the court to speak with Mistress Tirelle. After a short time, Mistress Leonie came out to resume my instruction in the textile arts.
There were stranger lessons to be learned as well. In my readings I came across the same story in two very different forms amidst Mistress Danae’s books. That tales of the gods could be told and retold was itself a sort of revelation, given how much priestly writing seemed concerned with assurance and certainty.
The first I found was a man’s story about the goddesses who made it their business to care for women. Much later in life, this tale would give me long pause for other reasons, but then it was simply the view of the world that caught my attention. T HE F ATHERS ’ T ALE Long ago, the world was a garden and each race of being and kind of creature grew in neat little rows tended by the titanic gods. Father Sunbones, first among them, walked each day among the rows and remarked upon the health of the crop. Mother Mooneyes came by night to prune the shoots and claim the harvest. Desire, their third daughter, was allowed to play among the fish-trees and the bird-vines, but forbidden the rows of anything that had fur or hair. “Your nature will wake them out of time,” Mother Mooneyes said as they feasted in the Blue Hall of the Sky. “Stay rather with the cold waterbreathers and the thoughtless fliers who will not feel your pull.” “It is not fair,” Desire complained in the manner of children everywhere. “Nothing is fair,” rumbled Father Sunbones. “We are lucky if we merely find order in this world, let alone fairness. Your brother Time complains of being denied the fish-trees for himself. He whines constantly of fairness as he walks among the trellises where the souled ones grow.” It was the souled ones Desire wished to sport among, those with two arms and two legs and thatches of forbidden, lovely, unruly hair. Though their eyes were not yet open and their souls had not yet flowered, she imagined embracing one then another, pressing her lips to theirs, touching their bodies with hers, until she hung like they from their trellises to voice her lust to her cousins the stars. “I know your thoughts,” whispered her brother Time. “Later, I will help you.” “It is always ‘later’ with you,” Desire hissed. “I want what I want.” “My power is in passage, not fulfillment.” Her brother smiled with faint promise. “Take me for what you will.” Desire could not keep her thoughts from the men in all their colors, as well as the ogres and fey and sprites and all their close-kinned kind, so she sought Time in his observatory tower at that part of the day where Father Sunbones and Mother Mooneyes exchanged their pleasantries in the privacy of the horizon’s blanket. “What is this help you offer me?” Time smiled again, the promise in his face a little larger. “Lie with me, for the fulfillment of my dreams, and in return I will grant you stolen hours to lie in the garden with the souled ones.” “Lie with you?” Desire laughed. “You are a stripling boy with a hollow chest and eyes as dark as Uncle Ocean’s dreams.” She touched her generous breasts through her shift, lifting them toward Time in mockery. “Why would I share my bounty with you?” Time smiled yet again. The promise had become great. “Because Desire will always be subject to Time. Absent in an infant, unformed in a child, raging in a youth, unfulfilled in an elder. My grant of hours to you will return a hundredfold in the world that is to come when Father and Mother awaken the garden.” So Desire lifted her shift above her head and showed her body to her brother Time. She was the perfection of woman, hair every color, eyes flashing so bright they were no color at all, lips as full and rich as the lily between her legs, skin smooth as a new-ripened peach. And though Time was hollow-chested and pale, and his manhood not so great, he could hold himself at stiff readiness forever if he chose-the power of his Name-and so he rode his sister long into the night, until her cries of pleasure became pleas for release. For even Desire can eventually pale of her appetites. Time finally spent the last of his seed upon her breasts. He rose, tore a strip from the nail of his least left finger and pressed it into his sister’s shivering hand. “Take this into the garden with you. Keep it close to your person always, and the time you need will be yours there.” Desire was so tired and sore that she shuddered to imagine another penis coming near her body. But she burned to put Time’s promise to the test. Gathering her shift over one arm, for she ached too much to reach up and draw it onto her body, Desire limped slowly into the garden. She smelled so of sex and fulfillment that even the cold fishes in their trees stirred at her passing. Birds thrashed on their vines, hungry for her flesh or just the hard salty scents on her breath. When Desire walked among the furred animals, they strained and bellowed, disturbed within their dreams. But when she came to the trellises where hung the fathers and mothers of all the souled races, their eyes flickered open pair by pair. Penises rose erect, nipples sprang from firm breasts, tongues crossed lips. Every being in that garden smelled her, wanted her, lusted for her. In her soreness and fatigue, Desire took fright and fled to the Hall of the Blue Sky. She dropped her shift and Time’s nail paring in the garden as she ran. Later when Father Sunbones came to check his crops, he found the souled ones awake and the animals disturbed. He also discovered the evidence of Desire’s passage and Time’s complicity. “The damage is done,” Father Sunbones told Mother Mooneyes. “Our children have roused the souled ones. The newcomers will go into the world with their spirits unformed.” He wept golden tears that seared the soil. Mother Mooneyes peeked out from the daylit heavens. “Perhaps that is well enough. Each can find his own path. Each can grow his own soul fit to suit who he is.” “But so many will be lost. Heartless, vicious, cruel.” “You name more of our children, Father. Not every child is Loyalty or Truth. Let the souled ones have their lives.” Father Sunbones listened to the counsel of his wife. He threw open the gates of the garden, plucked all that they had grown there, and herded his charges into the world. The fish fell into the rivers, lakes, and oceans. The birds took wing into the spring sky of a new world. Animals bellowed and fled across the land. And the souled ones took themselves to those places that suited each best and began to make towns and farms and tell each other stories of the hot dreams that invaded their long nights’ sleep. Then Father Sunbones went to Time’s observatory tower and cursed his son’s disloyalty. Ever more Time’s strength wanes with the year so that he passes all the pains of a life between each winter solstice. This is his punishment for lying with his sister Desire. Then Father Sunbones went to the Hall of the Blue Sky and banished Desire to her chambers for a year and day, so that she might not come out until her brother’s curse had fulfilled its first round and she could learn what had been done to him. But Desire had quickened with Time’s seed. While she stayed hidden in her chambers, she gave birth to a torrent of sisters, one for each little animalcule that her brother had spent within her womb. She fed the daughters from the seed that still lay upon her breasts, so that they drank milk of both man and woman. These thousands of sisters became the goddesses of women and spread out into the world in the aid of midwives and mothers and sapphists and prostitutes and girl children everywhere. Ever after, the gods of men made it their business to send these sisters home to Father Sunbones whenever and however they could, though it is a terrible and difficult thing to kill a goddess. The gods who were most passionate about this errand each gave a scrap of themselves to a holy order that raised the Saffron Tower in dedication to restoring t
he purity of souls and righting the wrongs of Desire.