“That the bracelet was your luck-piece?”
Deremer nodded. “I used protections; not even you should have been able to tell…”
“Hmph. The way you were waving it around, I’d have been blind not to guess. You young people have no appreciation of the value of subtlety.”
“I’m not giving up, you know.” Her voice grew stronger as she spoke. “Irhan will pay for what he did to my family! You can’t stop me.”
“I could, but I won’t bother. Unless you try involving Rikiki again.” Granny paused. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Deremer said coldly.
Granny nodded. “Mend your manners,” she advised conversationally, and left. Outside, she turned wearily toward the Street of Trees, and home. It wasn’t the most satisfying conclusion, and it was going to be a bit difficult to explain to Jin what had become of her mother and brother. Granny sighed. At least she’d recovered the Book of Curses. And Raivo might learn something from being a hazelnut for a year. Deremer, though, would almost certainly try to make trouble again as soon as her Day of Luck came and she could invest her magic once more. It was almost a pity that she wasn’t S’Rian. Well, Granny could handle Deremer.
She stopped a street vendor and bought a bag of nuts. A few blocks further on, she found one of the small bowls of nuts Liavekans sometimes set out “for Rikiki, for luck.” She filled it to the brim, and went on her way, humming.
The Green Cat
By Pamela Dean
9 Meadows, Rainday, 3317
The first task Verdialos gave me was to keep a journal. That was a year ago, and I have not done it. Whatever troubles drove him to the Green Priests, prying and tattling sisters cannot have been among them. The second task was to write down what drove me to the Green Priests. I have not done that, either. Since he has trusted me, I had better do both now.
I have been a very long time planning the end of my life. Even before I met Verdialos, this seemed just. I am the last of eight children, and any week-guest in the house can discover that everybody concerned wishes there had been only six. My brother, Deleon, ran away when he was twelve and I was ten, so they are no longer troubled with him. If I knew where he was, I would have long since gone to him. But he never sent me word. If he is dead, you may say I am going to him soon.
This will have to be translated for its inclusion in the Green Book. I am writing in the Acrivannish of the ninth century—Liavek’s thirty-second; unwieldy numbers do not trouble the Liavekans—which they call Farlandish. They call all the true kingdoms the Farlands, and all the languages—old or new—Farlandish. In fact, there are several dozens of countries and more languages, any of them a far more reasonable place to be and a far more melodious sound in the ears than Liavek and its language.
My family all come from there, but none of them can read the older language. My grandmother taught it me when I was little, so we could have a secret. She, too, thought that eight children were too many, but it was the first six that she disliked. She died when I was eight. My diction in this language is limited, because I stopped learning it so young; but I remember it well enough, seven years later. My sisters will think I have secrets, when they find this, but they think so already.
So, then, I am obliged to say what has happened to me this twelvemonth, and what my life was like before to make the twelvemonth happen so. Verdialos and The Magician and I will do the ritual tomorrow, by which time this must be finished. Like my brothers, who went to college to become even sillier than my sisters, I’ll stay up all night, swearing and scribbling and drinking bitter tea.
Floradazul just thudded in and thumped onto my cot. She can walk as if she were not there, when she chooses. But because my room is over Livia and Jehane’s, and I don’t want them to wake up, Floradazul chose to walk as though there were fifty of her.
I hope she will not mind the ritual. Verdialos swears it won’t hurt her. If we fail, she will remain only a cat, and I will have peace, however inartistically achieved. He takes her very seriously. She is the responsibility I must not shirk—a thing that has caused the Green priests considerable trouble over the years.
I met Verdialos because of a game Deleon and I used to play. It pleased us to think that, if we sickened and died, or fell into the Cat River during the spring rains, or ran beneath the wheels of a cart while on some distasteful errand, our parents would be sorry they had not loved us while we lived. We pictured gleefully the grief of our mother and father, and the consternation of our brothers and sisters. Even the hopeful imagination of youth could not see our brothers and sisters grieving for us.
We haunted a healer called Marithana Govan, who lived in the Street of the Dreamers and patiently answered all our questions day after day. Then we would go home, and one of us would be afflicted with all the diseases Mistress Govan knew of, while the other played a distraught parent or a jealous brother. During the summer drought, we flung ourselves into the shallow river and were dragged screaming under the raging waters. In streets deserted during the heat of afternoon, we fell shrieking in the dust and were trampled by horses or oxen.
I can’t remember exactly when or how these games became serious; or rather, since they were always serious, when they became insufficient. Sometime in the summer of Deleon’s eleventh year, we began the ranging about Liavek that I have kept up ever since. We were looking for places in which, rather than having a good chance of being killed, we could kill ourselves. We would look in the early morning, come home to write reproachful notes during the heat, and go back in the evening intending to do the deed. But there was always an argument over who went first, whether it would be possible to go together, whether one would die from jumping or merely break a leg, whether the notes were after all written exactly as they ought to be.
It is hard for two children in Liavek to find certain death. The consequences of failing to kill ourselves we did not care to contemplate. We did not think our parents would love us better for causing the neighbors to think we had been made more miserable than parents may rightfully make their children. We had always planned to leave the notes where only our parents could find them: a secret reproach might have softened their hearts, but a public one would have made them glad we were gone.
Verdialos has pointed out to me that it was only after the worst pain of Deleon’s absence was past that I turned fourteen—old enough to buy poison. If I had been able to get it one year sooner, I would not be writing this. When I could get it, the pain had lessened, and I had been given Floradazul, who not only loved me, but, unlike Deleon, would have been lost without me.
I met Verdialos in the month of Buds in the Liavekan year 3316, on my fifteenth birthday, in the late morning, on the east bank of the Cat River under the Levar’s Bridge. I was trying to discover the depth of the water; he was watching for people who thought they had discovered it already. He says that after fifteen years of looking for people who mean to kill themselves, one can tell them by the way they walk.
I had had no luck with long sticks or rocks tied to strings. I had decided that my choices were to find someone, a riverman perhaps, who knew the depths of the Cat River (which would be difficult and oblige me to talk to strangers), or to dive (which would be immodest if I took my clothes off, or drown me before I was ready if I left them on). I could not decide whether to go or stay, and I was furious. I did not hear Verdialos making his way down the bank.
“A good death to you, little sister,” he said behind me. He has a light voice that causes people to think him of no account, but he could not have startled me more if he had boomed like a City Guard.
“And a bad one to you!” I snapped, as if he were in fact one of my sisters, jumping out at me from under the stairs.
Although I did not know it then, this is the worst thing you can say to a Green priest, but from being so long among the uninitiated he had grown accustomed to it and was not much shocked.
“And what is a bad death, little sister?”
he said.
“Long and painful,” I said, happy to be furious with him rather than with the river, which was unreasonable, or with myself, which was unrewarding.
My fury did not vex him. He looked at me thoughtfully, as I have seen Floradazul look at a beetle she knows will taste vile. He was not very tall, like most Liavekans, and had big brown eyes and a hopeful face. He wore a green robe and no jewelry. His hair needed cutting. I wished he would go away.
“But if you chose the pain?” he said.
“Who would do that?” I said, as rudely as I could manage. He seemed to take no notice.
“Perhaps one who thought it would strengthen him for the trials of the afterlife,” he answered, just as if we were two men in a tavern discussing philosophy.
“I don’t think there is an afterlife.”
“But if there were, and it had trials, and pain in this life strengthened one for them, then would not a long and painful death be a good death?”
“Well, I suppose.”
“What death are you seeking here?”
“I dropped my necklace in the water.”
“I think you must have thrown it,” he said, smiling. After a moment I realized that he had seen me fishing further from the shore than one could expect to drop a necklace.
I looked at the ground. After a moment he said, “Why would a man who, not believing in the afterlife and thinking thus to have only this one, hasten to end it?”
I had had the healer on my mind as I went about the city in search of death, and I said to him something I had once heard her say to her assistant. “As a man who has only pain will take a drug to stop it, though it gives him a sleep so deep he cannot even dream, and in time will kill him.” Verdialos opened his eyes very wide, as if someone had dropped a piece of ice down his back. He does this when something startles his mind. If you do drop ice down his back, he hardly moves.
“This drug,” he said, “will dull the senses without killing the pain. It is very shallow to drown so tall a girl.”
“What do you recommend, Master?” I said, meaning to show him his presumption.
But he told me: the Green Priests are an order of suicides. This idea amused me greatly at first, because it seemed to me impossible: if all of them killed themselves, where was their order? But Verdialos explained to me about the responsibility one must not shirk.
I was walking along a wall once, in the Canal District, talking to Deleon over my shoulder, and he yelled at me to stop, and I did, and just where my next step would have been was a missing stone; and the canal fifteen feet down on one side and a forest of young trees twenty feet down on the other. I felt that same squeezing of my heart now. I might have killed myself one fine day and left Floradazul to be spoiled on Luckday and neglected the rest of the week, never knowing why I had not come back.
There was a great deal Verdialos did not tell me then. But he promised me a certain and beautiful death once I had shown his order that I had no obligations except to myself, and that those I labored under when I met him on the riverbank had been honorably discharged. He gave me a square of paper that had written on it, in an upright hand, an address in the Old Town; and scrambled back up to the bridge, smiling at me over his shoulder as if the two of us had just contrived a way to confound the wickedness of Ka Zhir for all time.
I went home feeling as if we had accomplished this. I had only one obligation. In the lightness of the first hope I could remember since my grandmother promised I should come to live with her one day, I thought this obligation would be easily dealt with. It was not.
My parents, who have no use for cats, had allowed me mine on the condition that I would take all responsibility for it. My brothers all affect to hate cats. I think Gillo likes them in his heart, but he would never show this to the others. My sisters are too timid to look after any animal, except Jehane. She truly loves Floradazul, though she will call her Flossie, and coo at her as if they were both imbeciles. But she would spoil her for six months, then forget to give her water and go into a decline when she died.
Besides, none of them would take the cat while I was still living in the house; and if I asked any of them to promise to care for her should anything happen to me, either it would be laughed off, and when the time came no one would care for her because everyone thought someone else should do it, or else they would begin to watch me. Given their other faults, it is a great pity that they are not stupid as well.
• • •
When I came home, they were all sitting in the parlor, reading or knitting. To the despair of our mother, Livia and Jehane and Isobel are no good at embroidery. I cannot even knit. I would have been scolded for going immediately upstairs, so I waited for a moment to pay my respects, rubbing Floradazul’s ears.
“Nissy,” said my brother Givanni, “that cat of yours has been at my bowstrings again. I’ll wrap them around her and choke out all her nine lives if I catch her at it.”
“Don’t scold your sister on her birthday,” said my father.
“Furthermore,” said my mother, “if you must solace yourself with superstitions, let them be Acrivannish; don’t dull your mind with the fancies of Liavek.”
“Separate body and soul and burn the soul, then,” Givanni said to me. Watching me, he added, “And make a hat out of the body.”
Isobel shuddered, Jehane cast her eyes up, and Livia said, “Who’d wear a fur hat in this climate?”
“You won’t catch her,” I said.
“Well!” said my father. “If one can believe this highly-colored and dubiously intended literature, Ka Zhir and Liavek are at each other’s throats again.”
My mother looked up. “Could you take advantage—”
“We don’t want Liavek,” said my father, tiredly. “We want to go home. Let Liavek stew; let Liavek rot.”
“Not,” said my mother, “so long as we have to live in it.”
“But it won’t be much longer,” said Jehane, placidly.
“It’s been too long already,” said Isobel. “I will not marry a Casalena, and none of the Leptacazes will marry me. And if we all marry here, who’ll be left for Nissy?”
“I’m not getting married, so save your worry,” I said, startling myself.
“Nissy, what nonsense,” said Livia.
“Thank you. I’m glad you approve.”
“Nerissa, don’t be rude to your sister.”
“She was rude to me first.”
“What are you going to do, then?” said Jehane.
I picked up Floradazul, who in the sensible manner of cats was about to flee the battlefield, and said the first thing that came into my head. “I’m going to have nine cats and a good library.”
“Who is going to pay for them?” asked my father. “I can give you a respectable dowry, but not for cats and books.”
“You set Gillo up in trade!” For some reason, men are allowed to be vulgar at certain times and in certain ways. Trade is vulgar; making and selling wine is a trade; yet my parents were pleased when my brother proposed to do so. He was not allowed to have Isobel help him, and was scolded for suggesting it. Remembering this made me angrier.
“Nine cats and a good library,” said my father, “are not a trade.”
“I’ll breed the cats and sell kittens.”
“Master Benedicti,” said my mother, “I told you we had lived here too long.”
“We have nowhere else to go,” said my father.
“This child must not ruin what marriage prospects she has with this babble of setting herself up in trade—and such a trade.”
“She can hold her tongue when it suits her,” said my father, “so you had best see that it suits her.”
“I’ll go practice now,” I said, and went up the stairs, quickly.
Floradazul sat in my lap, purring, while I tried to think of how to provide for her, and worried instead about how my family was likely to provide for me. I had always known that things could only get worse, but from time to time I had for
gotten how quickly it was likely to happen. In a year I would be old enough to marry by our laws; I was already old enough by Liavek’s. The boys of the other exiles had been all very well to play with when Deleon was sick or sulky, but they had no real thoughts in their heads and had once thrown a kitten into the river to settle a bet over whether cats could swim before they were grown. That one could not.
I had not met all the exiles, but I was not going to marry any of them. Liavekans were worse, having no manners and being generally either vulgar or inexplicable in their ways. I hated my family, but at least I was used to them. The idea of changing to a new hate was distressing. It was time to be gone.
The matter of Floradazul occupied me for three days, until I remembered from whom I had acquired her. Granny Carry’s house had been crawling with cats, though how she kept them out of her weaving was a mystery to me. My sisters used to get out of doing their needlework by claiming that Floradazul would give them no peace when they tried to work at it, which was perfectly true, if they were foolish enough to try doing it in the same room with her. In any case, Granny would hardly notice one cat more or less; and she was much too busy to ask awkward questions.
I was so pleased with this solution—it having come to me in the early morning—that I called Floradazul at once. She always comes when I call; she comes when the others call if she thinks they have food, or feels I’ve been too long away. I packed her into her basket and ran quickly out the back door, before anyone should ask where I was going.
Granny Carry lives in the Street of Two Trees. Although she is a blood-relation of my mother, Granny is not my grandmother, and I am not sorry. My mother finds her exasperating, and this is perhaps the only matter in which my mother and I agree. She does not visit us often, and some of us always visit her briefly on the great festivals—Liavek’s, not ours. I had not seen her since she gave me the kitten: Jehane, who likes her, has gone in my place since then. I am surprised Jehane likes her: she speaks so freely, and Jehane is so easily shocked. I do not care to argue with Granny: when dignity and decency are upset, it is never she who is discomforted.
Points of Departure Page 4