by Jay Lake
A test? A fraud? Did it matter? “What you offer me is a joining to your temple’s Blades. Shelter and fellowship in exchange for my skills.”
“Yes.” Her mouth wrinkled in a sad expression. “Your skills. There are never enough girls in a generation for what the temple needs. Not at the altar, not in the healing wards, not among the justiciars. Most especially not among the Blades of the Lily.”
“To kill once is hard,” I said, recalling Mother Meiko’s words. “To kill twice is easier. To kill three times is a habit. Most of your girls never take the hard road, do they?”
“No.” She sighed. “It is the Blades who oversee the Death Right.”
A thought occurred to me. “Who oversees the Blades?”
“Why, my dear…” Mother Vajpai smiled. “I do.” With those words, she spun into a snap kick that blended into a whirling slash of the edge of her hand.
I had walked for a month, and sailed a month prior to that, but the years before were filled with the Dancing Mistress’ lessons. They were in nowise lost on me. I slid beneath her kick and ducked away from the blow before throwing myself toward her balance leg.
Never kick unless you have no other choice, the Dancing Mistress had said. You are too easily downed with any of your feet off the floor.
Mother Vajpai had shown off. The hilt of my tight-wrapped knife struck the side of her knee even as I threw my weight against her ankle.
She went down hard, tangling in her red silks, but somehow her fingers caught me on the ear. We wound up rolling to a stop against some cushions on the floor. A slim blade poked into my throat, while the fingers of Mother Vajpai’s other hand were clawing painfully in my ear.
“Very good,” she whispered. My ear burned with the cut of her nails. The knife at my neck stung. “A new girl has never taken me down at the first lesson. But then you are not really being a new girl, are you?”
“It’s very nearly a habit.”
“Then you can learn so much more. We are done.” She released me. “Are you with us?”
“I have nowhere to go,” I said flatly as I rolled away from her.
“Now you do.” Mother Vajpai rose to her feet in a fluid motion I did not know how to duplicate, though I could see her knee troubled her. “You are one of us.”
I would be no tool. “Am I sworn?”
“Not yet. And not for some time to come. Go with Samma. She waits outside. She will show you the dormitories and introduce you to the teaching Mothers.”
Straightening my pale robe, I said, “I will be under no one’s lash, not ever again.”
“Go, Green. All will be well.”
For a while, all was well. I quartered with the Aspirants of the Blades of the Lily. Samma was my bedmate and dining partner and, more to the point, the one who guided me through the training exercises, through the winding halls of the Silver Temple, through the endless services filled with chanting homage to the Lily Goddess.
This was a reflection of the Pomegranate Court and the Factor’s house, except here was light to those shadows. Where Mistress Tirelle had kept me close within walls and isolated, the teaching Mothers herded their aspirants in a clotted little crowd, the nine of us who were currently passing through the Petals.
Other aspirants trained for the other orders of the Lily Goddess. I soon learned that the Temple took in girls from the great families and trading houses of Kalimpura and the rest of Selistan. Each renounced her social responsibilities and any direct access to her wealth to dedicate her life to the Goddess. In return, the girls were sheltered in powerful luxury and permitted to take up traditionally male arts such as healing and law.
Those girls were of the high and mighty, and they certainly knew it. The healing and justiciary aspirants were paraded about at services and on feast days, sometimes brought before the courts of the city-unlike Copper Downs, Kalimpura had managed to settle on and maintain a reasonable succession of rulership, even if the system was difficult for outsiders to comprehend.
The Blades were another sort altogether. One girl of our nine, Jappa, had come from a trading house, training with the justiciary aspirants awhile before joining the Blades as an older-than-normal Second Petal. Otherwise our girls were street rats and foundlings and natural children of unmarried daughters.
And one foreigner, of course.
Me.
My skin might be Selistani, but my scarred face was not. A small child with my looks would have been drowned. An older girl would have been cast out for a beggar. Even more so, my speech was not Selistani. Most of all, what I had in my head was very much not of this place.
My fellow aspirants quickly came to prize some of that foreign knowledge. Guttersnipes were not so educated in cookery, but they certainly appreciated food. While some among the women made it their business to be in the temple kitchens at all hours of the day, my special talents in that area were quite different.
We had lessons of every sort. My experiences were truckled out of me in those sessions. We also trained with the Lily Blades themselves; they frequently took us out into the city with them.
Some of those excursions were runs, much as I had done by night with the Dancing Mistress back in Copper Downs. The rooftops of Kalimpura were not so useful as in my old city, but the Below was, if anything, more elaborate. The undercity was inhabited by entire gray-capped castes of people who came to the surface only at night. Armories and cisterns and granaries and dungeons and smithies and a whole life could be found in Kalimpura’s Below.
This was a kind of heaven to me. I knew how to move underground. My falls and drops and dead reckoning were as good as Mother Shaila’s, who led many of the underground training runs, and better than most of the other Blades. She quickly had me drilling the aspirants. I became caught up in reconstructing the lessons once taught me by the Dancing Mistress. How had she led me to my knowledge, what steps had she taken me through to the understanding?
That in turn kept me awake at nights and during our rare free hours, working on paper and slow-stepping through exercises with Samma.
During those months, I also took up my belled silk once more. I had neglected it on the road from Bhopura, lost in my despair, but I had never completely abandoned the thing. I could remake the count of days once more-how often had I lost it before? The other girls mocked me awhile, but eventually they grew accustomed to the momentary sound of tiny bells ringing as I sewed a little while in some late hour of the evening.
As I attached my bells, I thought about children. Federo had stolen me for a special purpose. Not stolen, really. Papa had been paid for me, after all. Here in Kalimpura, there were children on every street. They carried burdens and sold fruit and raced with messages strapped to their forearms and cringed in the backs of carts. How many of them were free? How many of them were with their mothers and fathers?
I could not forget the promises made to myself back in Copper Downs. Would I somehow save all these children? Could I help any of them? How would I find and best a rich man surrounded by blades and bars?
When I was able to set those thoughts aside, the hardest part of my new life was fitting me into the Blade training. Other than the underground, where I excelled, I had missed much that they expected of someone my age.
“Now try to be stepping below my attack,” said Mother Vajpai. Today she wore a simple robe like everyone else, though the waist was cinched and the skirt tied off into legs. We were in one of the lower courts beneath the temple, where the Lily Blades had their passages of arms. When the women of the order were not using it, aspirants were free to collect bruises as we and our training Mothers saw fit.
Mother Vajpai had taken a special interest in me.
Samma, Jappa, and three others of our nine were in the lower court that day. Lanterns hissed with the sewer gas that drove their flames, shedding bright, almost shadowless light across the width of the damp stone room. Straw covered the floor. The edges were lined with rolled bolsters of muslin padded with cotton batting.
I edged around Mother Vajpai. Here we had rules. “Only those steps and movements and blows that are permitted in the circle,” she’d told me.
“When will we fight without rules?” I’d asked Samma later. She laughed and told me that was the last Petal, before we flowered into full Lily Blades.
So we had rules, until we didn’t. Much like my time in Pomegranate Court. Nine years with rules, and a last few moments without. This was a way I could live.
I backed away from her, letting my eyes follow her feet. Stance was everything, I’d been taught, starting the night that the Dancing Mistress had thrown me down to the stone.
When Mother Vajpai struck, I almost missed it. Her stance had not changed at all. Only the posture of her upper body. She swung that flattened right hand. In the stretching moments of the coming blow, it looked like a sword blade to me. I slipped on purpose, sacrificing balance in order to drop out of the line of the blow. I knew I could roll away to recover before her next swing. It would not be a tactic I could use forever, but at the size of my middle youth, it should have worked.
It might have worked, against the other training Mothers or the working Blades. It would have worked against the other aspirants, only because they were all slower than I. Against Mother Vajpai, who had seen me do this before, it only caught me a handstrike from her left, which swung in just out of my line of sight to slap me in the right temple.
I collapsed in a welter of redness and pain. Even breathing seemed beyond me for a time. When I caught up to myself, Mother Vajpai was speaking. “… from the center. Always to be following the eyes of your opponent. There are very, very few who can strike where they do not look.” She glanced down at me, smiling so that the silver edges of her teeth gleamed in the lamplight. “Can any of you take that blow as Green has?”
I heard a shuffling of feet, but no one spoke.
Mother Vajpai reached down for my hand and helped me up. “We do not train so much to forms,” she told me in a conversational voice, as if it were up to the others to overhear. “When one fights in a form, one expects one’s opponent to do so. Most whom you will meet with bared blade and bloody eye are not so obliging.”
“Thank you, Mother.” I struggled not to stutter as my head rang.
Her voice pitched up again, teaching-loud once more. “Green is being here less than two moons, yet she is better than any of you at defense. She can step out of almost any blow save the very trickiest, as I was just delivering. She can fall and come up again before her attacker has recovered their swing. I am wanting you to watch how she centers her body. I am wanting you to watch how she watches me. Once she learns to read my eyes properly, even I shall be having a struggle to land a blow upon her.”
She reached over and brushed her fingers across my face before wagging her index finger in front of me. “Your eyes are being good,” she said. “Shall you be attacking me now?”
“Yes, please.” I’d only ever touched her once, that first day. Mother Vajpai had limped slightly for almost a week. This was a quiet point of pride for me. Now, the only time we’d sparred since then, I might as well have been fighting the warm air from a bread oven for all I could touch her.
Our usual fight trainer was Mother Anai. She had been working with me on attacks, and I’d touched her three times already. I was getting better, and I thought I was ready to try Mother Vajpai again.
A feint was pointless. She was far more experienced. Likewise her reach of arm beat mine by a good margin. If I were fighting for my life, without the rules of the room, I might have gone for her face. As it was, I bowed, spun left, locked my eyes on her right side, then dove out of my own line of vision toward her left leg.
She stepped right through my attack, slapping me on the head to show the blow she could have landed.
“What is being so strange about you, Green,” she said once more in that conversational voice, “is that you are so natural at defense, but are so struggling with offense.”
I hopped up from the floor. “I learned in a different school, Mother.”
“Were you taught to fight at all?”
“No,” I admitted. I’d managed to avoid this question so far, out of sheer embarrassment. “I was taught to dodge the attack, then flee.”
“Ah.” She looked thoughtful a moment. “I will speak to Mother Anai. We will find a way for you. You are being strong and fast as any Blade we have ever trained. There are merely certain arrows which have not yet been placed within your quiver.”
Though I did not glimpse then what this would portend for me, I saw the Lily Goddess for the first time in those months. We knelt to prayers every evening at sundown unless something urgent excused us. There were services every day, at which the priestly aspirants spent almost all their time. The Blades and their aspirants were expected mostly on Monday and Friday. Monday is the moon’s day, of course, and the moon governs women during the years of motherhood. Friday is the Goddess’ day, honoring the beauty best displayed by youth.
On ordinary days, when there was no feast or presentation, the Temple Mother-an old woman with frosted hair and strangely pale eyes for a Selistani-or one of her senior priestly Mothers would come into the sanctuary before dawn and consecrate the altar amid the sacred circle. The altar itself was a great silver lily, almost six feet wide, sculpted as a flower yet half-opened. The sanctuary stood at the core of the temple building, so that the soaring, tapered roof was like a chimney above the circular walls. Benches rose along the walls, with a steep drop from layer to layer so that we aspirants looked at the tops of the heads of the women below us.
There was always a great deal of praying and incense and scented smoke; then the Temple Mother would address the Lily Goddess directly through the altar. For the first weeks, I thought that just another form of prayer. But one Monday, the Temple Mother was following her order of service when a wind came up in the sanctuary. It ruffled the pages of the prayer books, which I could not read, for the crawling Seliu script was still a mystery to me at that time. It tugged at hair and sleeves and trailing hymns.
This was a whirlwind, I realized, circling on the Temple Mother. She seemed to get larger and larger, until she towered above us all. I understood this even at the same time that my eyes plainly saw her standing before the silver lily just as always.
When her voice boomed, it should have ground stone. The Goddess pronounced words that were not meant for me, but concerned rather justice for a house I did not then recognize the name of. The very sound of Her echoed in my head, made my knuckles ache, buzzed in the stone of the bench on which I sat.
I said nothing when prayers resumed, but as we rose after the final chantry in order to find our way out, I poked Samma. “That was very strange.”
She brushed my hand away with a little smile. “What?”
“How the Goddess…” My voice trailed off when I saw her blank look. She not only had not noticed, but she also seemed unable to understand what I was telling her.
Later, I sought out Mother Vajpai. Our nine were taking the midday meal down in the dining hall, but I’d skipped the seating to find a quiet moment with her. She was in one of the public offices, reviewing accounts with a bursar from the Court of Starlings. That court dealt with trade in textiles and leather goods, and oversaw justice, banking, and regulation for those trades and their castes within Kalimpura, as well as dyers, scriveners, and the lesser toymakers.
When the old man, bent but bright, shuffled out of the little room, Mother Vajpai nodded to me. I arose from my bench in the hall amid other appointments and supplicants and stepped within.
“What is it, Green?” she asked, not unkindly. “In moments, I must see the adjudicator from the Frutiers’ Guild about a Death Right matter, so I shall ask you to be quick.”
“This morning, at the services…” My words felt strangely foolish, even in my own mouth. “I thought I saw the Goddess.”
“You give Her no more credit than you are giving the ice-sellers in the
street, Green. Even so, I have no doubt that if you are thinking you saw Her, then you saw Her. She appears within the mind of anyone to whom She speaks.”
“She wasn’t speaking to me, Mother. Her words were about justice for a noble house. The Temple Mother was tall as a tree, while a great wind bore in circles around us all.”
“Really?” Mother Vajpai was rarely surprised, but she seemed so that day. “Interesting. Perhaps you are in the wrong order. I am certain that the priestesses would love to have you on the strength of this report alone.”
“N-no thank you, Mother.” I turned to leave.
“Green.”
I looked back at her.
Mother Vajpai smiled sweetly, the silver edges of her teeth shining wetly. “I am pleased you are telling me such things.”
And so began my long troubled journey on the path of the Lily Goddess.
Kalimpura was a city of festivals. The Lily Goddess had Her own, of course, a day that involved flowers raining from the rooftops and women in silver veils pouring from houses great and small. The Temple of the Silver Lily decanted a special violet wine that was carried in trays atop the heads of dancing dwarves and children hired for the occasion from the Mummers’ Guild.
Every week, it seemed, some god or goddess or harvest or ruler out of history or famous battle was to be celebrated. Someone was constantly parading through the streets with a bobbling serpent riding the backs of forty men, or a giant ship made of gutta-percha and oiled canvas, or great juggernauts bearing caged tigers and demon statues. Once, I thought I saw caged demons and tiger statues.
The usual crowds were thick as spring mud. A person could run across the heads and shoulders of a festival crowd.
The nearly continuous state of celebration also meant that there were always people in outlandish costumes. To my eye, trained always to the seriousness of state, this was akin to living amid an everchanging field of flowers. Every step outside the temple was a chance to encounter a beaked head larger than the Factor’s coach, or stiltwalkers bound for their luncheon from a parade rehearsal, or a troupe of false foreigners in costumes meant to evoke Hanchu or the Saffron Tower or the Smagadine city-states.