by Jay Lake
These were the days that were mine. I had lost almost everything from the beginning of my life except a few memories.
The attic was close and warm even in the autumn weather. Federo and the Dancing Mistress were gone once more, this time for a while. “We cannot pass in and out without drawing attention to you,” he had said.
“We will return when we have gathered your needs,” she told me.
I sat with salty cheese and stale bread and water that tasted like rooftop and wondered what I might have done differently. What I might do next.
When I grew bored with regrets and should-have-dones, I paid attention to the world beyond this latest prison of mine. I did not clean the window, for fear it would attract attention. The grime covering it kept me from any real sight of the street. I could hear the warehouse below without difficulty, and I discovered that if I sat just beneath the round window, I could hear what passed in the street.
Some sounds were readily understood. Teams of horses passing by, accompanied by shouting or the crack of a drover’s whip. Occasionally they stopped with a squeal of iron-shoed wheels on stone. The beasts would whicker to one another as the busy noise of the warehouse took in the drover and his cargo.
People passed in conversation. No words reached me except for the occasional exclamation of surprise or excitement. I took comfort from the murmur of passing voices nonetheless.
I could hear more from the warehouse beneath me. Loads shifted in, loads shifted out, and some foreman with a high-pitched voice bawled orders I could clearly make out. Most of it was meaningless to me, the chatter of men at work: “The other cannery stack, damn your lazy boots!”
This was like being inside the Factor’s walls and hearing the world outside. Except in this place that world was much, much closer.
In the late afternoon of the second day since I’d once more been left alone, I heard the tramp of men marching in unison. Someone shouted orders in clipped syllables I could not follow. I heard the clatter as a few were told off to my warehouse. I heard the argument that followed. Men would be told to work into the evening. There would be no pay from the city or the Duke. They would rot in hell. They would be happy to send them there. An argument without names or sides, just shouting men and, once, the meaty thump of a hard strike by someone’s fist.
After a while, the boxes began to move. I heard crates shift and clatter. More cursing, of the ordinary, working kind. I lay on the floor with my aching ear pressed against dusty splinters, waiting for death to climb the walls below and find me.
Why had I insisted on my silk before I would follow their plan? I could have gone forth and had some small chance at changing the order of the world. Now I would be taken up without the words to break the Duke’s spell.
If I could have stilled my breathing, I would have. Not to make myself die, but to be as silent as a piece of ceiling lumber. To be quiet is to live. I did not stir for cheese nor bread nor water nor the piss pot all that evening. They continued to move below me. An officer came occasionally, shouting for someone named Mauricio each time.
Eventually the warehousemen were released and the great door rumbled shut. I had never felt such relief as I did when quiet reigned below.
I sat up with my dry mouth and my urgent bladder only to realize that if this Mauricio were canny, he might have left a man behind to lurk silently within the warehouse. What if an ear were pressed to the underside of my floor, waiting for me to move and scrape and sigh?
That new terror kept me in place very late into the night. Finally the need in my bladder became so urgent that I could not put it off for all the fear in my heart. I crept silent as fog to do my business. The splash of the stream sounded like thunder to me, but there was nothing to be done for it except finish, then continue to hide until the danger was gone.
I realized the danger might never be past.
I was startled out of dreams of being hunted across ocean waves in a small boat. Legs kicked as I reached for something with which to defend myself. I was brandishing a small hunk of cheese before I realized that Federo had lifted the trap. A quick glance at the round window showed it was still night outside.
“I do not think that Fencepost Blue is so dangerous,” he said mildly. “But I will see if I can find something a bit less stout the next time I go shopping.”
Giggling, I collapsed. “I thought one of those soldiers might be hiding downstairs to catch me moving up here overnight.”
“Soldiers?” Federo’s face grew alarmed. “A moment, please.” He reached down through the trap and brought up a pair of bulging canvas sacks. After repositioning the flooring, he sat and asked me to explain exactly what it was I had meant.
I told him what I had heard the day before, and mentioned the name Mauricio. Federo looked troubled. “They suspect you to be in one of the warehouse districts. Not that this is surprising. They searched here all evening, then departed?”
“They searched the whole area. The troop I heard marching dropped a small group of men here.”
“Hmm.” He took off his laborer’s flattened leather cap and stroked the back of his head, thinking. “I will see what I can learn. But this is not something I can ask too many questions of. I am under suspicion already, if only for having known you. It will not take long before they realize how much contact the Dancing Mistress had with you.”
“Far more than her other candidate students?” I asked.
“Of course.” He reached for one of the bags. “But here, I bring news and better.”
Out came a bolt of fine silk, tussah weave and forty-two inches across. Unrolled, the silk was seven yards in length. And beautiful, too. I set our hooded lamp on the floor to light the cloth. It showed a rippling sheen like water flowing down the threads. The color appeared green in the lamplight, some medium shade, though I could not say what in that illumination.
“This is most beautiful,” I said quietly.
“There is so little I can ever give back to you. I thought at the least you should have a good quality measure of cloth.”
He showed me the bells, a great mixture of kinds. “I could not buy so many silver bells in any one place,” Federo said by way of apology. “So some are brass, or iron, and some are larger than I might have liked.”
Still, they were bells. Real bells. The bells I could remember from home had been little tin cones on a pin. They tinkled, but they did not ring. Some of these were fit for a choir to sing the hymns of grace to. “I shall have music like a tulpa when I walk in this,” I told him. Their multitude of tiny jingles brought me a sense of peace.
Federo produced a velvet roll with needles stuck into it. “In case some grow dull or bend.” He also had several sticks with spools of thread stacked upon them.
I readied a needle and took up one of the tiniest bells. This one resembled a little silver pomegranate seed, and made a single plaintive tinking noise when I dangled it between my thumbnail and fingernail. With a silent thanks to my grandmother, I sewed the bell to one corner of the silk, which flowed like a green river from my lap.
Federo sat on his heels and watched me sew awhile. After a time, he asked, “May I help you sew, or is this something you must do for yourself?”
I considered that. The answer was not immediately obvious to me. I had always thought of the silk as something a woman made for herself. Clearly, I had not sewn my own bells as an infant, though. Just as clearly, whatever tradition demanded had long been abused and discarded in my case.
The outcome was what mattered most now.
In a sudden rush of thought, the decision was straightforward enough. “I would be pleased to have your help, but at a cost.” I caught his eye in the faint light rising up from the hooded lamp. “Tell me where I came from, as you understand it. I remember the frogs and the plantains and the rice and my father’s ox, but I never have known the name of the place. None of my studies ever showed me maps across the Storm Sea.”
He picked up a needle and struggled aw
hile to thread it. I did not press him at first for words, for I could see the thoughts forming behind his eyes. Finally Federo got a bell sorted out and bent to his side of the silk. He would not meet my gaze as he began to speak. “Surely you know there was the strictest order never to mention your origins within the Pomegranate Court.”
“Which is foolish. All one need do is look at my face to see I was born nowhere near the Stone Coast.”
“Of course. The beauty we all prized… prize… in you was founded in part on that very thing. But to mention your birth-country would be to remind you of the past, and goad you into keeping those memories strong.”
“Unlike how you and the Dancing Mistress treated me,” I said dryly.
“Plans within plans, Green.” He finally glanced at me, then looked back down at a fresh bell he was embarked on. “You hail from a country called Selistan. It is found a bit more than six hundred knots west of south, sailing from Copper Downs out across the Storm Sea.”
Selistan!
I finally had a name for my home. Not just a place of frogs and snakes and rice paddies, but a place in the world with a name, that appeared on maps.
“Wh-where in Selistan?”
“I am not sure.” He sounded uncomfortable. “Kalimpura is the great port where much of the trade from across the sea comes. I landed at a fishing town some thirty leagues east of Kalimpura, in a province called Bhopura. The town itself is called Little Bhopura, though I know of no Great Bhopura anywhere.”
“We walked far from my village to Little Bhopura,” I said cautiously.
Federo laughed. If his amusement had not been so obviously genuine, it would have hurt my heart. “We hiked about two leagues across a dry ridgeline separating the river valley where you were living from the coast where I landed.” He smiled at me fondly. “You must recall that as a vast journey, but think how small you were then. I doubt you’d ever been more than three furlongs from your father’s farm in your life. Today you could cover the distance in a few hours. You would not even notice the effort.”
I recalled the sense of enormous space, walking the entire day, stopping to take a meal. He was not mocking me; he was describing my earliest childhood. Everyone begins small.
Another bell wanted threading. I focused on that a moment to gather my thoughts. Federo’s silence was inviting, not angry or defensive. Below us, the warehousemen pushed their great door open and began their day.
When I spoke again, my voice was low. “Where is my father’s farm?”
“I… I do not know. Not anymore.” He sounded ashamed.
Federo was not telling me something. I picked at the thought awhile. I did not wish to push my anger at him. That well was deep and inexhaustible. Right now I was thoughtful, not angry. “Federo. What was my father’s name?”
His face was so close to his sewing, he risked poking himself in the eye. “I do not know.”
“What was my name?”
He would not meet my gaze at all.
My anger raced. “You bought a girl whose name you did not ask from a man whose name you did not know.”
Federo looked up at me, though his face was mostly in shadow. “I have bought many things from many peo-”
“I am not a thing!”
We were both silent, staring at one another as some crate crashed to the floor below us.
“I know you are not a thing,” he hissed after the rumble and mutter of voices below resumed. “I am sorry for how I spoke. But please, Green, you surely take my meaning.”
Bending back to my own sewing, I grumbled that I understood. But how could he not know? How could this man buy me like fruit at a market, strip me away from my family and all my heritage, and recall nothing?
Federo resumed speaking. “I can tell you this much: A man there watches for families with children of… potential value.” His voice dropped as he blushed with shame. “F-families where there is trouble. No money, or the death of a parent.”
Which made me what? A commodity, of course. A brokered, broken child. “I suppose you have a bill of sale?” I asked in my nastiest voice.
“No.” Now he sounded weary and sad. “You were a cash transaction. I have a note in my account book.”
“Was I a bargain?”
He stared at me a long while. Then: “I believe I am done with this conversation.”
I wanted to make a fight with him. I wanted to rage at him for stealing everything from me and then pouting at my questions. Federo had claimed the privilege of power when he bought me, and now he claimed the privilege of injured dignity in order to remain silent concerning the truths of my life.
There was no purpose in attacking him. It might satisfy my pride, but anger from me would not prompt him to tell me any more than he already had. Patience was a hard lesson. My teachers had been very thorough.
The Dancing Mistress joined us that night. She brought more food, this time strips of smoked venison along with dried braids of shallots and garlic. After our conversation failed, Federo and I had spent the day sewing in silence. Occasional comments passed between us, but the best thing I could find to do with my anger was let it retreat back down the well from which it ever bubbled.
Her arrival was a fresh breeze stirring our thickening air of mistrust. She looked at us both and must have understood what had passed. Eventually I came to understand that her kind did not judge human faces so well, but they could read human scents quite clearly. The two of us reeked of the banked fire of our argument. That evening, all I knew was that she sat down and laid out a simple meal, then quite literally interposed herself between Federo and me.
“You have made great progress.”
We’d sewn over twelve hundred bells. Less than four years of my life, but a good day’s work. My fingers ached with the myriad stabs of the needle. That was progress.
“Yes,” I admitted.
The Dancing Mistress inclined her chin as she nodded gravely at Federo. Her voice was pitched low. “Your day was good enough, I trust.”
“We spoke of things past,” Federo muttered.
She turned back to me. “This upset you?”
What an astonishingly stupid question. I just stared at her.
“You are afraid,” she said.
“Angry, not afraid.”
“Fear and anger are opposite faces of the same blade.”
I’d read versions of that statement in half a dozen texts. “Don’t quote platitudes at me!”
“Just because words are often repeated does not rob an idea of its truth.” Her voice remained mild. “Some might even think the opposite.”
“I have a lifetime’s worth of anger. What am I afraid of, then?”
The answer was simple enough. “The consequences of what lies behind you. The price of what lies before you.”
“Price. Life is nothing but prices.”
“To be sure.” She picked up a needle and began to sew where I had left off to eat. “You are twelve years of age now, yes?”
“I believe so,” I admitted.
Federo winced.
The Dancing Mistress continued. “At home, you would marry soon.”
Mistress Cherlise had told me I’d be wife to some sweating farmer. True enough, I supposed, and I didn’t wish for that life. But what had I become instead?
She went on as if I had answered. “Here in Copper Downs, you were almost ready to be turned out as consort for the Duke, or one of his favorites.”
“Monthlies or no monthlies,” muttered Federo.
“What of it?” I asked.
She was implacable. “You are afraid of that change. Both your fates have been denied you. You were born onto a path that Federo bought you away from. You were trained within the walls of the Factor’s house for a different path. Even our night running work was little more than a twisting of that second way. You cut that fate away when you marred your beauty and killed Mistress Tirelle. What remains?”
“Fear,” I told the silk I had once more gath
ered into my hands.
“Choice,” she said. “Which you have exercised to join Federo and me in this latest effort.”
I wasn’t afraid of what would happen, I realized. That was almost beyond any control of mine. I wasn’t afraid of my choices, either. She did not quite have the right of that. Even with all her cruelty, Mistress Tirelle had always prepared me for some kind of greatness. I had been spared the jaws of the ocean leviathan. Endurance had watched over me with a purpose. The prospect of extraordinary effort did not daunt me.
Everybody died. That was fearsome, but this fear was more than that. Everybody hurt. The fear I felt was somehow still more.
I thought awhile as I sewed. My grandmother had gone to the sky burial wrapped in her shroud. My silk was supposed to be the track of my life, the thing that told my days. Each bell should have had meaning, this one when I met my husband, that one when I bore the first of my children.
Finally I decided that I was afraid for my spirit.
I looked up at the Dancing Mistress once more. Her sloped eyes gleamed in the light of our little lamp. She was waiting for me to speak.
“Do your people have souls?” I asked her.
Maybe her answer would tell me more about mine.
She thought for a while, glancing at me as she worked. The hooded lamp glowed between us. Federo picked with his needle. He seemed content to wait out the conversation.
Finally the Dancing Mistress spoke. “When a child is born, we bind the soul with flowers and food. The community feasts to share the soul. That way it is not lost if there is an accident or disease, but kept alive within the hearts of many.”
Curiosity competed with my fear and frustrated anger. “What about your names?”
She smiled. “Those are for our hearts alone.” She gathered up a handful of the silk and shook it at me. Hundreds of bells jingled, those not swallowed in the folds of the cloth. “Here is your soul, Green. Do not fear for it. Most people never find theirs. You are making yours as real as your hands.”