Mother of Souls: A novel of Alpennia

by Jones, Heather Rose

  She had always felt safe under Henirik’s eye, no matter how rude the joking and pranks became, but she hadn’t gone out to the plaiz during carnival since his death. At first there had been the excuse of mourning and of the boys being so young. Later, she had shrunk from the idea of going out into the holiday crowds without an escort. In recent years, Elinur and Charluz would come home, dangling the strings of their masks, laughing at how they’d danced with this stranger and answered back the jests of that one. But the thought of encountering her students’ parents…Carnival gave license but people still remembered afterward what license had been taken. Now, with Serafina’s enthusiasm added to Elinur’s invitation, somehow this year it felt right.

  A late storm had left crusts of snow in the shadows and discouraged any festive dress more elaborate than a heavy cloak and a domino mask, though the players in the guild shows shivered through their lines in their usual costumes. The small party took turns explaining the crowd’s laughter to a bewildered Serafina, who struggled to follow the clipped workmen’s dialect on the stage. Then they bought hot crisp pastries from a man tending a fry-pot in the shadow of the statue of Saint Nikule and sat on the low surrounding wall to eat them. The statue sat lower than the main plaiz and its surrounds gave some protection from the chill wind.

  The rivermen were doing a brisk traffic bringing carnival-goers to the landing. It was cold enough that the smell of the mud and weeds on the lower steps was barely noticeable. A small crowd of sturdy children were earning coins providing a steadying arm to those disembarking to climb up under Nikule’s watchful eye.

  “Why is he down here and not in the middle of the plaiz?” Serafina asked, looking at the bronze saint where he held up his hands in blessing.

  “Because he’s here for the boats, not the land,” Charluz answered. “The barges always come by for his blessing on their way downriver.”

  Elinur added, “They say cargoes used to be unloaded directly into the Nikuleplaiz so the saint would keep an eye on thieves, but that must have been a long time ago. It’s too shallow here for barges, even when the river isn’t low.” She laughed. “They’ll have to throw the bucket at him again, come floodtide this year.”

  Serafina glanced at her curiously. “What do you mean?”

  Luzie took her turn to explain, “The start of floodtide is marked when the river reaches the feet of the statue. If there’s no flood, they draw a bucket from the river and pour it out.” It sounded a little silly when told like that. “It was because of the fever originally,” she said. “The flooding stirs up the putrid mud and brings the fever.” Luzie shivered, and not from the cold. It hadn’t been river fever that carried Henirik off, but it had taken her brother Ianilm when they were both still children. It had swept through the city that year striking rich and poor alike. “Ever since the city was founded, people leave at floodtide, if they can. The fever’s rarely as bad now as it was in Domric’s day, but floodtide became a holiday for its own sake. Shall we walk again? The stone’s too cold for sitting.”

  The sound of fiddles and pipes drew them to the smooth-flagged yard beside the church where dancing had started. Not the quadrilles and waltzes favored in ballrooms, but jigs and round dances. Luzie watched Charluz and Elinur drawn off immediately by eager partners but she shook her head politely at the hand offered to her.

  “Go on,” Serafina urged.

  “I don’t like dancing with strangers,” Luzie explained. “But you should dance.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  At first Luzie thought it was only modesty until she saw Serafina’s panicked look. “Not at all?”

  A shake of the head. “My family, we weren’t…we didn’t…” She shrugged helplessly.

  “Don’t tell me your husband never took you to balls,” Luzie teased. Immediately she was sorry.

  Serafina gave a little half smile meant to turn away sympathy. “He told me he enjoyed having a wife who didn’t expect to go to parties and wouldn’t pester him.”

  Luzie added that to things Serafina had said in the past. “Was he ashamed of you?”

  Another shrug. “No, not the way you mean. But he took no interest in society. He could have. His family has money. But he only cares about his books and manuscripts.”

  She’d gone this far, why not dare more? “Did he love you at all?”

  Serafina turned on her with pointed questions. “Did you love your husband when you married him? What has love to do with it? We marry because that is what one does. Do you know? Paolo doesn’t even realize I’m not in Rome. He’s been off in Paris hunting down books for the Vatican for two years. He expects he can return anytime he likes and I’ll be waiting with clean linens on the bed and all his correspondence organized and dinner on the table as always. This time I grew tired of waiting.”

  Luzie flinched in the face of Serafina’s anger.

  “No, I never minded that he didn’t take me to concerts or dances or to meet his family. I wouldn’t even mind if he went to other women. But I minded that he never taught me mysteries like he promised. I minded that I did all his work in the archives when he was gone and he never said a word of praise. I minded that he expects me to wait at home until it suits him to return.”

  It had been a mistake to ask the question; there was nothing that could be said to that. “I’m freezing again. If we aren’t going to dance, there’s less wind under the arches and we could have our fortunes told.” And the drifting smoke from the food-sellers would be less noticeable there. Luzie took Serafina by the hand and led her to the covered walk that bordered the plaiz, where they were besieged by market-women with trinkets and charms.

  “Ribbons, Maisetra? Fine silks and laces?”

  “A candle with a blessing from the Holy Mother, guaranteed to cure the cough.”

  The woman who offered it turned away briefly to hawk and spit. It might have been only the smoky air, but Luzie made a note not to trust her cures.

  “What would you buy? Combs for your hair, Maisetra?”

  Luzie pushed past the more forward of the hawkers to the stretch where the charm-wives gathered. They were less inclined to besiege their customers, and instead waited for a need to be presented before they gathered around to argue the efficacy of their wares over those of their rivals.

  Serafina gazed at each of them in fascination. What did she see? Luzie wondered. She leaned closely. “Can you tell which of them can work mysteries and which are frauds?”

  “It’s not…” Serafina looked down, realizing that she had been staring. “It’s not quite like that. Some of the charms have power and some don’t. At least from what I can see. But some may only show it when used. And some of the women, I can see that they…Margerit would say they have the ear of the saints. You can see the echo of holiness following them. But that doesn’t mean that all their works have power. It’s complicated. They don’t always know what they’re doing, you see.”

  Luzie didn’t see at all. She laughed at the thought. No, she didn’t see at all. “Who shall we ask to tell our fortunes?”

  No sooner had the question left her lips than they were surrounded by offers. Luzie looked sidelong at Serafina, waiting for a sign.

  “If you want the hope of truth, that one,” Serafina said, nodding at an older woman wrapped in red shawls, sitting behind a barrel that served as a table, back against the building wall.

  They were all older women, of course, and a few old men. Who would trust a young charm-wife? And who would try to scrape a living peddling cures and market-charms if they still had the strength for more certain work?

  The woman turned sharp eyes on the both of them, looking from face to face, but she didn’t rise.

  “What do you care to ask, maisetras?” She unwrapped a set of cards and began shifting them around in her hands with quick, jerky movements.

  Luzie looked at Serafina who nodded at her to go first.

  “There is a…an endeavor that I have begun.” Did she really want to know
what her Tanfrit songs might become? Why had she chosen that question?

  Before she could either offer more details or change her mind, the woman shuffled the cards one last time and laid out several on the barrelhead, keeping a fingertip of her left hand on each to keep the breeze from shifting them.

  “Ah, they speak clearly,” the fortune-teller began, tucking away the remaining cards and pointing to those displayed in turn. “It is a long path you’ve set your feet on. You see here? But a dark stranger will help you to your heart’s desire.”

  Luzie glanced at Serafina again. They both grinned like schoolgirls. A dark stranger indeed. It didn’t take any mystical visions to suggest that.

  “Beware the man who will betray you. He has less power than you think. Not enough to destroy your work, but enough to destroy your dreams. That is all the cards say.”

  It was the sort of vague answer that anyone could give, but Luzie pulled a few coins out of her reticule and placed them in the woman’s hand. “Thank you. Serafina, what will you ask?”

  Serafina nodded to the woman, almost like a little bow. “I ask nothing now, but if I have a question that needs a true answer, I will return, Mefro. I—”

  Whatever she had meant to say was lost in the noise of a sudden quarrel from farther down the arches. A thin man in a barge worker’s coat was shouting, “I know you have it!” as he grasped the wrist of a dark-skinned girl who twisted to break free.

  Serafina started forward but Luzie pulled at her sleeve saying, “It’s nothing to do with us. Probably a pickpocket.”

  “I know that girl,” Serafina answered, shaking loose in an echo of the other struggle. She pushed through the crowd and joined several of the old charm-wives who confronted the man with little more than scolding tongues as weapons.

  Serafina drew herself up with a haughtiness that Luzie had never seen in her before.

  “Let her go and be about your business. Celeste, shall I call the city guard?”

  The girl shook her head violently but finally managed to twist free. “I told you before, I don’t do that sort of thing.”

  The bargeman swore but seemed daunted by the closed ranks of women arrayed before him. His voice turned more wheedling. “You could if you wanted. You’ve done it before. For her.” And then, directed to Serafina, “This isn’t your affair. What’s she to you?”

  By now Luzie had edged her own way through and joined Serafina at the girl’s other side. The man was deeply gone in drink and there was no telling—

  “Fire!”

  The shout came from down by the statue of Saint Nikule.

  “Fire!”

  More voices took it up, and in the confusion of running steps and sellers quickly scooping up their wares Serafina gathered the girl to her side and the bargeman disappeared. They made their way edgewise through the crowd out into the main plaiz where pointing hands and shouts drew attention to a plume of smoke on the far side of the river.

  “The old warehouses on Escarfild Island!”

  “Not the new wharves?”

  There was a splash of oars as a wave of rivermen took off from the tie-ups at the stairs to see if rescue were needed.

  “Will it spread?” Serafina asked anxiously.

  “Not to this side,” the girl, Celeste, said confidently. “Probably not off Escarfild with the air so still.”

  Luzie offered more reassurance. “Escarfild used to be an island with a channel between. It silted up years ago, but there’s a break in the buildings. Everything’s falling to ruin there. Probably some poor soul lit a fire to keep warm and it spread.”

  A pall of more than smoke lay over the carnival festivities. Some were running toward the nearest bridges to see what assistance might be needed. The players were shedding their costumes, certain that frivolity was no longer the order of the day. Charluz and Elinur were nowhere to be seen.

  Luzie turned to Serafina who still kept an arm around the dark girl’s shoulders.

  “I thought I’d see Celeste home. In case that man returns.”

  Remembering his drunken anger, Luzie nodded. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Thank you, Maisetra,” the girl said, “but there isn’t any need.”

  “It’s not far out of our way,” Serafina assured her. “It’s no trouble.” As they made their way through the thinning crowds at the edge of the Nikuleplaiz Serafina collected herself enough to do introductions. “Celeste is the daughter of Dominique, the dressmaker—the one who made that beautiful red gown for me. And she’s quite talented at working little mysteries.” She turned to the girl once more. “That man who was bothering you, will he come back, do you think?”

  Celeste shrugged. “He always comes back and he always goes away. He thinks I should make charms for him anytime he asks, but I don’t do the kind he wants. Not for why he wants them. He wouldn’t hurt me, though. Too afraid of Maman.” And almost as an afterthought she added, “He’s my father. At least he says he is.”

  Luzie felt embarrassed, like she’d stumbled into a private quarrel. The dress shop lay down one of the narrow streets paralleling the river where the smoke was lighter than it had been in the open plaiz and the panic that the conflagration had sparked grew faint in the distance. Serafina and the girl Celeste chatted about relics and candles and different colors of inks and all manner of things that made no sense at all.

  “Is she your student?” Luzie asked when they stopped at last in front of the shop front with its neat gold lettering.

  Serafina shook her head and looked wistfully after Celeste as she unlocked the door. “No, there’s nothing I can teach her.”

  Luzie thought she saw the girl stiffen but then she turned and curtseyed before closing the door behind her.

  “She works with an entirely different sort of mystery than what I’m studying,” Serafina continued as they began walking again. “Mine’s all books and philosophy and studying the symbols and meaning. She’s like a cook, taking the recipes she’s learned and changing a bit of this and that until it tastes just right. She has the ear of the saints and just enough vision to improve on the mysteries she’s been taught. In some ways, she knows more than I do. But it’s nothing at all like what Margerit teaches.”

  Luzie considered the image: changing this and that in a recipe. That’s what it felt like when Serafina worked with her on the music—if one could imagine a cook who had no taste at all.

  * * *

  In the weeks that followed, Serafina brought back scraps of Tanfrit’s life scribbled on bits of loose paper: the quotations scattered throughout Chizelek and Pontis—Luzie was learning all their names. What could be gleaned from Tanfrit’s commentaries on Gaudericus, beyond the obvious fact of their friendship. The accusations of later writers who wavered between charging her with laying the foundations for the mechanist heresy and dismissing her work as of no moment at all. The memorial stone from Urmai. A copy of an old broadside ballad that told of two lovers whose pact with the devil was punished by a flood that had changed the course of the river.

  “But Baroness Saveze says that’s nonsense,” Serafina pointed out, “because there are maps of the city from well before Tanfrit’s day that clearly show the river in its present course.”

  Two different women emerged from the fragments. There was Tanfrit the scholar who had traveled abroad to study, who had been in correspondence with the foremost men of her day, who had returned to Rotenek in triumph to take up a position at the university, who had laid the foundations for understanding the mechanics of mysteries and for what might have become a science of miracles. And then she disappeared entirely until she died in obscurity near Urmai and was remembered only by a beloved sister.

  And there was Tanfrit the heretic who had tempted Gaudericus from an orthodox path with the promise of earthly power, and who had been ill-paid for her pains when he made—or refused—a pact with the devil to be given perfect knowledge in return for foreswearing all other loves, mortal and divine. Tanfrit the vengeful who
called down (or was punished by) a storm that drove the Rotein out of its banks and through the streets of the city. Tanfrit who, in despair at her unrequited love (or driven by madness), threw herself from the Pont Vezzen into the furious waters and was swallowed up. The stories all contradicted each other. Sometimes it was Tanfrit herself who sold her soul for power and was rejected by the more saintly Gaudericus.

  Serafina spread the scattered papers before her. “It’s impossible. How can she be both a famous scholar and a villain? How can she be Gaudericus’s inspiration yet not figure in his most famous work? Why would the university have appointed her to the faculty if she were a heretic? And if they did, why should they deny it happened to this day?”

  But within all the contradictions, Luzie saw the connecting threads. And—seeing them—she finally admitted to herself that nothing short of a complete opera would do justice to Tanfrit’s life, even if it would never be performed on stage. Perhaps she could include a few songs at a time in recitals. She began sorting through the notes and laying them into something of an order. “If I were writing a biography, I’d need to find answers,” she said. “But for this I only need a story. Look here. What do we know? Her family were weavers—”

  “How do you know that?” Serafina asked.

  Luzie looked over the pages again. “It’s here…no, I guess I assumed. But she’s always using weaving as a symbol. The web God weaves. And here where she talks about a guild being the fibers spun together into a thread, and how the thread is strong because of the spinning, not because of the fibers. It made sense. But maybe it would be better to start with the end. The climax will need to be when Tanfrit calls up the waters and throws herself into the flood.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the most dramatic part. And, of course, the end of her story,” Luzie explained.

  “No,” Serafina said. “Why does she drown herself?”