by Jay Lake
There was one Below who was far more than a name heard once or twice a season. We first encountered him under the warmest night of the year, in the middle of the passage of the weak northern summer.
The Dancing Mistress had me doing falls in the dark those months. She would bid me stand in someplace fairly safe, then slip away with my coldfire in her hand. A minute or two later, I would hear her click her tongue, one click for each yard-length of the drop. I needed to summon the courage to step forward, find the edge, and jump blind.
The first time we tried that, with a fall of less than three feet, I was terrified. With practice, though it never became easy, the discipline grew reasonable. I learned how to trust a partner, and I learned how to fall in the dark.
“You can already find walls by listening for echoes,” she told me. “We will work on you judging the depths the same way, once you know how to drop in safety.”
A strange exercise, but I’d long since realized her greatest purpose lay in pushing me past my own limits, time after time.
I stood on a balcony, a low rail a foot before me, though I knew that only from experience. The Dancing Mistress clicked four times. A fall of about twelve feet. That would require a forward tuck with a full roll, before I landed four points down. No need for the bone shock of striking on two feet when hands could ease the blow. The shoes and gloves spared my skin on these exercises, but I could twist a joint or jam a forearm or leg easily enough. My size would help avoid this, while I was still young.
As I was bending for my leap, someone touched my shoulder. I yelped and dropped. The stone balustrade trapped me immediately. My attacker bent close.
I caught him in a wide-handed slap. He backed away with a sharply indrawn breath. I could hear the soft noises of the Dancing Mistress hurrying to my aid. A moment later, the gleam of coldfire appeared.
“Ho,” she said softly.
“Unnh…” The stranger’s voice was muffled. I realized he had a hand on his face, and that he was in fact male. “You boke my node!”
“This is the girl, Septio. Girl, this is Septio.”
“Sir,” I said cautiously. My tongue was tied with a strange fear. I found my feet, but kept the drop behind me close in mind. If they came to blows, or even sharp argument, I’d go over into the twelve feet of darkness to be out of his reach and away from whatever violence this newcomer and my Dancing Mistress might commit together.
“I didn’t bead to scare you.” His voice was still strange. I scented a new metal-salty tang. So that’s how it sounds when a man’s nose fills with blood, I thought.
The Dancing Mistress chuckled. “Septio is a Keeper of the Ways.”
I heard it as a title. Titles had been much discussed lately in the Pomegranate Court. I wanted to ask for whom, and of what ways, but I chose silence. In my experience, others often would fill it.
“Do you know of the Ways, girl?” Septio asked, his voice clearing. I realized then from his tone that he was little older than I. A boy, down here in the dark alone.
The Dancing Mistress touched my shoulder. “She is from across the Storm Sea. What she has been taught is extensive, but very… focused. The Ways are distant from the agenda of her keepers.”
I had never heard so much said directly about the purpose of my time at the Pomegranate Court
She squeezed my shoulder harder. “You may answer for yourself.”
To speak to a stranger! “The sun is just as hot for every man,” I told him in my own words, my old words. By then that was one of the few things I could remember Papa saying. Then in Petraean: “I do not know, sir. The Ways are hidden from me.”
“The Ways are hidden from most people.” He took his hand from his face and drew a deep, snuffling breath. “You have good reflexes.”
He and the Dancing Mistress exchanged pleasantries; then Septio moved on into the quiet depths.
“That was a priest,” I finally said.
“They are not generally so young.”
I awoke one day to the sound of voices. A crowd of women had gathered in the courtyard. They were placing chairs and sorting themselves into positions in the dawn light. I had never seen so many people at once in the Pomegranate Court-four at the most before this morning. If not for the Dancing Mistress’ night runs, I would not have seen more than four people at once in the years since Federo drove me here from Fortune’s Flight.
Each one of the women wore a straight-backed gown in black satin, with ribbon cross-lacing bodices that were slashed to show gray silk beneath. A uniform of sorts, shared by the two dozen of them.
I dressed myself as well as my unprepared wardrobe allowed, then stepped outside to find Mistress Tirelle and Mistress Maglia awaiting me. Mistress Maglia was clothed to match the women below, while Mistress Tirelle was swathed as always.
“Come, Girl,” Mistress Maglia said. That was unnecessary. I could see what was wanted. Besides, it had been years since I’d let my rebellious nature overcome my curiosity.
I followed the Mistress until she set me in a chair upon a small riser. That placed me high up overlooking the uniformed women. Instruments emerged from cases, carriers, and sacks. Polished brass gleamed in the morning sun. Mellow brown woods shone in the shape of a woman’s curves. Narrow silver pipes trilled as their warming-up began.
What I had studied as harp and spinet and flute, one instrument at a time, was about to unfold before me in the array of a performance. I was entranced. My own skill with anything but voice was marginal at best. Mistress Maglia had given me only scraps and foretastes of this.
Mistress Tirelle stood close, stretching to speak with me. “You know the tests of the fruit. This is the same, with music.”
Mistress Maglia came to my other ear. “They will play pieces of music known to you. The first is the overture to Grandieve’s Trollhattan Moods. You will listen through. Then they will play again, but certain musicians will play flat or off-key or out of tempo from time to time. When you hear an error, you will point to the offender.”
I clasped my hands. She nodded, a sharp smile on her dark-browed features. “When I am wrong, what will happen?”
“Mistress Tirelle will record your marks as given by me, and show you punishment later.”
I had not taken a beating in almost two weeks. It seemed improbable that I would finish the day without a score of blows due to me.
When they played, the women made a beautiful sound, which twined around me. It must have been audible in the other courts as well. The Grandieve piece is a study of moods, a series of tone poems about an icy island in a high-walled northern bay. Mistress Ellera had once shown me a painting of Trollhattan. I could see the sound pictures even when I had first practiced it on my little flute.
The orchestra made it as big as the sky.
They played through perfectly, then fell silent. At direction from Mistress Maglia, they resumed. This time one of the horns was flat in the very first measure. I pointed, the woman nodded and set aside her instrument. Two bars later, a viol slipped out of key. I pointed again. Another nod, another instrument fell away.
By the end, I had missed but three. Only four players still carried the composition.
If not for the promised punishment, this would have been a fascinating exercise.
So began my training with others. All women, still, but more and more came to the Pomegranate Court in the months that followed. We staged dinner parties where some women wore black sashes to indicate they would be served and eat as men. Women in leather trousers marched in review as if they were a squad of guards. Women in pairs danced alongside me in the practice room or out in the court while a small orchestra played.
I was learning to be in the world. Somehow this was stranger and more frightening than being below the stones, because this was the truth of what they pushed me toward.
Every night I took my belled silk from its imaginary hiding place and added to it. These days, the bells were a cascade of tones and keys, different sounds that
would have been a waterfall of music had such a thing ever existed in truth.
I loved it, for all that it was pure figment.
We found Septio again and again underground. Our paths crossed often enough that I soon realized it was not coincidence. He, like Federo, played a role in the silent conspiracy that wrapped my life with an invisible thread.
I did not strike him again, and Septio did not remind me of my first attack. Instead we took time to talk on occasion.
“The gods of Copper Downs are silent,” he told me. “They are real as the gods of any other country. I could show you their beds and bodies, except that their power would strike you blind.”
“It’s not merely silence if one has been reduced to bones.”
“Gods are different.”
Later, the Dancing Mistress and I spoke quietly while taking turns climbing an ornate wall and dropping free.
“His god’s name is Blackblood,” she told me.
“Not someone you should want to invoke, I think.”
“I do not know. Septio has common cause with others who disagree with the Duke of Copper Downs. Common cause does not mean common interests. My folk are not usually of significance to the gods of men, nor they to us.”
There was small purpose in asking the Dancing Mistress of her gods. She said so little of her people that I did not even know their name for themselves. Any more than I knew hers. I understood, though, that they were quite concerned with paths and souls and some connection that ran between them one and all.
“I am human,” I said quietly.
“You are not of this place. Your home has its own gods and spirits. They should be of importance to you.”
“Tulpas,” I said, the word leaping to memory. “Like the soul of a place, or of an action. An idea, I suppose.”
“The tulpas concern you. This city belongs to Blackblood and his fellow sleepers.”
“I am of this city now.” That was a hateful thought, but true. “I can scarcely converse in the tongue of my birth, while in Petraean, I can speak learnedly on dozens of topics. The music of my people is unfamiliar to me, but I know what instruments they play here. Likewise the food, the clothing, the animals, the weapons. My roots may be in the fire-hot south, but Copper Downs has been grafted over me.”
“Perhaps,” she said after a little thought. “They have dozens of gods here in this city. Blackblood is only one. Each has their concerns, their purposes, their temples and priests.”
“It is like a market, then. Each stallholder calls his wares, and people pray where the fruit is freshest.”
There was something sad in the Dancing Mistress’ voice as her slow reply came. “You may have the right of it, but you miss the deeper truth. Gods are real, just like people. Petty, noble; vicious, kind; strong, weak. But you do not buy one for an afternoon and then throw her away. Each god means something to this city. They are always of something, called at need, staying until after all have forgotten them.” She sighed heavily. “So long as it is not I who calls them.”
Federo came time and again. He would sample my cooking, examine my needlework, or watch me dance. We would talk, but I always held my tongue from the words that counted. Mistress Tirelle lurked in doorways to overhear what we spoke of. If I expressed myself too frankly, or was too bitter, there would be a beating later.
Where I wish now that I had found a different way in those years was that Federo and I never spoke in my words. We never used that language for which I then had no name. He knew some of the words, to be sure, for we had spoken thus when he first bought me away from Papa.
Mistress Tirelle treated the words as if they were an infection. Federo was no different.
My stories had slipped further and further away in the nights when I lay abed and thought on my earliest memories. What always lay close to mind was Endurance, and the sound of bells.
I never did see the other candidates, but just as Mistress Tirelle had me working amid larger groups of people and showing more of my accomplishments, so the competitions increased. Hardly a month went by that the Factor did not send for something of skill and purpose from his girls. Calligraphy, in the classic style brought from the lands of the Sunward Sea. A dance designed by me and taught to a servant who would deliver it to him, set to the same piece of music used by others. A hound to be trained at a certain trick in two weeks’ time.
The outcomes of the competitions were not reported back to me. I could on occasion gauge by Mistress Tirelle’s mood when news had come, but precisely what news, I had to guess.
The truth of the whole exercise had become plain to me. The Factor manufactured women in his house, great ladies for the nobles and high merchants of Copper Downs and perhaps the smaller courts along the Stone Coast. There was pride to be taken in what I learned and mastered, but it was still slavery.
When Mistress Cherlise came, I knew this all over again.
She interrupted my nights as no one but the Dancing Mistress had done. We sat and spoke of how my breasts were beginning to bud, how my blood would soon flow. She had little books in dark leather covers filled with pictures of men and women in the throes of passion. Mistress Cherlise showed me those as well, before explaining how I would more likely be used-hard, with no thought to any pleasure but my lord’s, and required at all times to smile and beg and plead and always play the soft, warm hand.
The first time she put this forward, I grew angry. I held my emotion in check, but the Mistress must have seen it in my face.
“What do you think the lot of women is in this world, Girl?”
I spoke without thinking. “T-to choose, if nothing else.”
“You were not born here. You came from somewhere, yes?”
I nodded.
“A small village, or a farm?”
“Yes.”
“When you grew, what would your choices have been? A farmer, no doubt. A boy from some neighbor’s land who would know nothing more of love than what he’d learned from his father’s bullock. Here, at least, you know what can be, and how to achieve it if you get the chance. There, your choices would have been narrow as a thread, and brought you little joy at all.”
They still would have been my choices, I thought. That was my oldest argument with myself, and one I somehow always seemed to lose.
She showed me much, undressing her own body with casualness so I could see how a nipple perked with chill or damp or a gentle touch, how the curve of a breast felt beneath the fingers. Likewise her sweetpocket below. We discussed shaving and hair, how the blood coursed in the monthly rhythm, and the different fluids that came with sex. Mistress Cherlise gave me certain exercises to perform deep within my body.
“These will not defend you from a beating, nor save you from a fall, but they will help you manage your choices and keep your body safe,” she said.
We both lay naked on the bed in my sleeping chamber. “When will I need the exercises?”
“Soon. Always be ready.”
She sat up, and I helped her into her smallclothes.
Soon? I was not quite twelve years of age. How soon could it be?
When I had first come here, I had barely been as tall as Mistress Tirelle’s waist. Now I could see the wart at the top of her head. Almost nine years I had spent in the Pomegranate Court. Growing, learning, being remade time and time again. If not for the stolen freedom of the night lessons by the Dancing Mistress, I would have had nothing but the company of women within these bluestone walls that whole time.
My education was frighteningly detailed, but it was also incomplete. I could prepare ducklings Smagadine over cream and rice, and find a flaw in a polished silver service for forty-eight at a glance, but I had no idea how to buy a cabbage in the market, or where one might hire a cart. A great lady did not need to know everything. She needed to know only those things worthy of her attention.
There were other holes, as well. None of Mistress Danae’s books had discussed anything of the recent history of Copper Downs.
If not for meeting Septio in the underground, I would have had no idea of the city’s gods, let alone that they had fallen silent for centuries. No one ever discussed the Duke within the walls of the Pomegranate Court, either. He was another thing I learned of only in my stolen moments outside.
Government, trade, the true state of affairs in the city: Why would these be hidden from a great lady in training? The Factor’s house was wrapped in mysteries enclosed in a circle of questions spiraling in on itself until the truth was swallowed like a shadow under the noonday sun.
I had added more than three thousand bells to the silk I carried in my mind. The tally of the wrongs done to me had grown so lengthy that I’d long since set it aside in favor of my original resolve to rule these people through their words. My own words I kept more carefully since I’d realized how many of them I had lost.
I lay in my bed very early in a morning of my ninth autumn in the Pomegranate Court and wished perversely that my arms were long enough to massage my ankles while leaving my legs straight. Mistress Tirelle swept into my room in a flurry of huffing breath. Her rounded face was flushed dark and miserable, like one of our tree’s fruits gone to rot, and she was sheened with sweat.
My first thought was for what I might have done to wrong her. My second was a nasty pleasure in her discomfort.
“Up, up, you lazy girl!” The duck woman slapped the covers away from me.
“I am-”
Her murderous glare cut my words short. “The Factor will be here within minutes. You must present yourself.”
It was not even daylight outside. He could not be so early. No one of importance rose before the dawn. Not in any book or story or hallway gossip that I had ever heard.
I remained calm in the face of her fear. Sitting up, I stretched. “Then I will wear the green silk shift. And take the time to brush my hair with a few drops of oil.”
The dress was the color of Federo’s eyes. It also set off my dark brown skin to great advantage. As for my hair, though I kept it coiled and pinned most often, when it was down, it flowed to my thighs and drew admiring glances from many of the women who came to work with me. Mistress Cherlise was especially taken with it. She’d advised me not to let my hair grow ragged with neglect, and never forget the effect it would have on men.