by Jean Roberta
“It was pleasant to break my solitude. You will not think of it so, but you kept an old woman company, and that’s a fine, gracious thing.”
“You are not so old as that.”
“I forget that in your country the grayness and bruises of age descend like anchors on a fraying rope. As soon as the first blush of adolescence is past, the flesh puckers and creases while the tendons wither. It’s the winter, which bleeds you of vigor. It’s the food, which lacks spice and so does not arm your livers.” The sorcerer tips her head back. “Where I’m from the grandmothers keep hold of their resilience and dignity long after their heads are white.”
“Why did you leave?” Ysoreen says before she can clinch shut the strings of her curiosity.
“A callow conviction that my will was the sun around which the world must revolve. I offended a woman of prominence and supremacy. And so, as the dusk of my life approaches, I’m severed from my kin and clan, to wait for the end in a land with ice for marrow, which delights only in conquest. A land that loathes me.”
“You could’ve wedded.”
“I could have.” A deep chuckle. “I thought you said a wife was less use than a second head?”
“I meant—for myself.”
The charm inches toward completion. Topaz beads glitter in the velvet of feathers and fur. “Do you want no one to grow old with? It can be difficult to weather alone the decades when your vision dims and your reason fades.”
“Then,” Ysoreen says, “I’d have to marry a woman at least ten years my junior.”
“Or one to whom age does not mean weakness.” Erhensa lifts the triangle and exhales upon it.
Ysoreen imagines that breath against her cheek.
•
It is death to sway the mind of an Ormodoni. When I entered Scre, that was one of the compulsions I bowed to, and it slithered into me where it abides even now, a snake of spite and abasement. But it is not Ysoreen’s thoughts that I pluck at, nothing so coherent as picture or language. It is only a look through warped glass. Enough to see that her dream is a bucking beast of russet and soot, snarled with longing.
I wake her, and the dream falls apart like muscle tearing under a machete.
She answers the door in armor. Always she wears it; refuses to be seen without. Despite its protection she flinches at the sight of me. Have I struck too harsh with my trick; have I sundered her courage?
“I wanted to finish my account of Areemu.”
It is to her credit that she is instantly alert. “As you wish.” Perhaps reminded of courtesy a young woman owes one her mother’s age, Ysoreen takes my elbow. Her grip tenses then relaxes, firm.
To my library, where the talisman simmers in the symbols of my country, the symbols of Sumalin. Laminated petals captured at their prime: the liveliest purple, the tartest yellow, the purest white. The seeds of papayas that will never grow here. The shells of tortoises that won’t survive this cold. My shelves strain with volumes from home, paper and wood, alloys and mosaics. More than any treasure, I’ve guarded these, some brought with me on that exiles’ ship, others purchased and amassed over my banishment. I’ve become known as the madwoman who’ll trade jewels for books, so long as they are from the island of my nativity.
Ysoreen conducts me to my seat with a courtier’s gravity, the way they do in high-ceilinged Institute halls. She unfolds my shawl, draping it over my shoulders. Then she steps away, hands clasped behind her.
“Where were we? Yes. The presentation of Areemu. She did not yet live, and if her eyes were clear jewels they did not yet see. It was this unlife that made her bearable to her prospective mistress: it was still possible to think Areemu a doll, satellite rather than sun. Seizing Areemu’s shoulders, the princess ordered that she live. This manner of waking shaped Areemu; prepared the facets of her logic. She would have made a fine instructor at your Institute. No human mind is keener; no pupil a quicker study.”
Ysoreen stiffens. Her teachers ought to be proud of her, their Hall-Warden, so strict and strictly adherent to their every code. “What have you taught her?”
“Any skill or discipline she cared to learn. Astronomy, painting, horticulture.”
“What else was she like?”
“This.”
The door opens and Areemu steps through.
A glance too long or a thought too weighty will scatter her, this shimmer in the cold. But Ysoreen Zarre will not be able to tell that. Areemu seems as solid as either of us; more, for we are merely suet and fluids while she is—was—harder elements, sturdier substance.
My daughter is holding a dress I trained her to sew, and in this art she exceeded me: a marvel of sleek fabric and wave-patterns, embroidery of tails and shark pectorals to honor my ancestral land. Laughing soundlessly Areemu shakes out the gown to show me her work.
Ysoreen’s attention is held fast by my mirage daughter. I know then that I will have Areemu back. I will have my daughter back and the chambers of my house will echo no more; the chambers of my heart will brighten again.
“Your gift will be finished by noon tomorrow. I will be sorry to see you go.”
“If I—” Ysoreen has turned to me, but her thoughts are looped tight around Areemu. “If before I leave I ask you a question, will you give me a true answer?”
“You are of Ormodon.” I know what the question will be.
“Not that. I want…an answer that is not obliged. If such a thing is possible.”
“I will give you your answer,” I say, folding that memory of Areemu to myself, lustrous as the best nacre-silk.
•
It is the code of Ormodon to be true to the self. Hold your soul before a convex glass each dawn, her superiors said, and study it without mercy. Let no secrets elude your gaze, for it is their way to suppurate. Instead, mine every last one to find its strength; hammer the metal of your secrets until it is supple and strong. With this, sheathe your will. Your desires shall not be weakness but armor for the weapon of your mind.
This is what she has not mastered, her one flaw. This is what she must master now.
Before, it was simple to sort her small wants, her transient hopes, into those that might be acted upon and those that might not; those that she could do without and those she could not. What is prohibited, what may be obtained. None of them was ever so tangled as this.
It doesn’t have to be. Erhensa will say yes. Marriage to an officer is better than gold, and Ysoreen can give the islander everything. Elevation, if Erhensa wishes it. Unquestioned right to live where she does; do as she pleases.
A daughter who lives and grows, to help Erhensa forget the golem. They’ll need a blood-rite and a willing womb. There’s never a shortage of refugee women who will take on the burden; it earns them three years of wanting for nothing and a chance at citizenship.
Ysoreen doesn’t wait. She passes the manservant in the corridor, who gives berth and stammers that his mistress is in her study, does the Hall-Warden not require directions, does she…
“She knows the way.” Ysoreen finds herself laughing, her steps buoyant. An aviary of possibilities in her chest.
Erhensa looks up, and Ysoreen fancies that her mouth flexes toward a smile. There is a circle of color in the sorcerer’s irises that she hasn’t noticed before, the shade of good citrines, and she marvels at this newfound clarity.
“A question, you promised.” Erhensa’s voice is a caress.
The cautious eagerness of that. And why not? Those glances, those gestures. Ysoreen gathers herself and goes to one knee before the sorcerer. Bolder than she feels, she clasps Erhensa’s hand; savors with a frisson the texture of it, soft-rough, calluses. “Mistress Erhensa, I’d like your leave—”
“Yes,” Erhensa exhales. “Of course, yes.”
Ysoreen’s thoughts teeter and tip over. Momentum alone drives her to complete her sentence. “Mistress Erhensa. With your leave I would court you, and at a later date ask to be yours in marriage. Would you have this?”
B
ut the answer is yes, already; her throat needs not dry, her heart needs not race—hunter chasing prey—after her desire.
Except Erhensa’s fingers do not knit into hers; except Erhensa does not clasp her face or bend to kiss her. All she says is, “Oh, Hall-Warden,” before she frees herself from Ysoreen.
On her knee still, Ysoreen swallows, breathless. She does not— “You are saying no?”
“I believed you would ask an entirely different question, and it is that which I answered. The shape of your moods, the direction of your temperament. I couldn’t be surer.”
Her armor jangles—too loud—as she comes to her feet, quick as the burn of shame. Quicker. “But I thought.”
“I was a fool, singular in my purpose.” Erhensa shakes her head. “Hall-Warden, you’ve a future ahead of you, a ribbon that spools incandescent around the core of your spirit and station. What could you want with an immigrant sorcerer as old as I?”
“The heart doesn’t think.” Ysoreen sets her fists against the hard metal at her back, glad for the cuirass. It fortifies her composure; keeps her formal. Her words are in the rhetorical mode of the Institute. “It told me it found beauty in you. It told me that it wants. I obey, for if it is fulfilled then my intellect and humors will both come to benefit. If it goes unfulfilled, as it now does, then I will have lanced it and bled it of any authority over me.”
“An odd philosophy, but it surely is superior to repression, which is universally hopeless. I did not mean to mislead you.”
Ysoreen does not clutch at her breast, which throbs and roils with the terror of having been laid bare. “What did you mean to accomplish?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I say it does.” Her control asserts, piecemeal, as much habit as discipline.
“And I may not deny a Hall-Warden.” Erhensa’s wariness returns, and it is as if the last three days never happened. “Areemu was animated by a specific wish, with the shape and tune of a certain age. Her components remember that still—not for long, not forever, but for now.”
“I would,” Ysoreen snaps, “never consider a golem wife.”
“Matrimony wouldn’t have been necessary. Only your passion was required. It is moot, in any case. You will take Areemu, I suppose.”
“Yes.” Her palms are clammy, her pulse yet unsteady.
“You said golems are your study. Tell me this, would it have worked?”
“With a specific ritual, known only to its creators. But that is moot.”
Erhensa sets the casket into her arms, the fox-owl talisman around her neck. “Good day, Hall-Warden Zarre.”
Ysoreen grips the case; thinks of dashing it to the ground. Yet what purpose will it serve? The glass will shatter, but the bars and stones: those need the solar furnace, a proper disposal.
She makes a perfunctory bow. She leaves; she flees, outpacing her humiliation.
•
My daughter then is gone, the last dream and echo of her. Only in the weave of my recall does she live, and that will diminish as age devours its due. I may create a skein of my memory, and each strand would be so vivid, so near solidity. Except to whom will I leave that; who will treasure Areemu’s images? Who will treasure our long talks of home; who will find meaning when I ask Areemu, do you remember the taste of coconut, the sweetness of palm sugar?
Perhaps the Hall-Warden is right that I should’ve wedded. No woman of Scre in their frosted arrogance would have looked at me. In the refugee camps, however, I could have found women far closer to Sumalin than to this nation where winter’s children reign. It is how unions are frequently made among Scre tradeswomen too poor or uncomely. Any life would be better than in the camps, and I present a far loftier prospect than being a potter’s spouse, a cobbler’s concubine.
It is futile to contemplate. This is not a choice I may make in faith, for all that I would give a desperate woman succor and she would give me companionship. For that paltriness I will not betray my nuptial vows, made on a sun-drenched day beneath palm shades, my bride and I heavy with a wealth of pearls we dived for.
We could have grown old side by side. There would have been daughters, sharp and spirited. One might have gone to the palace a handmaiden or magistrate, and another still might have honed herself to discipline not unlike Hall-Warden Zarre but tempered with the kindness of our sun.
Instead my wife gave me Areemu, hastily purchased and dearly paid for. There was no time for any other token; no time to spare for the conception of a flesh daughter. Neither of us broke that day when I turned my back to Sumalin and my face to the sails. Areemu at my side, wearing the pearls my bride and I had meant to pass to our children.
Age means possibilities trampled in our wake. Age means a serpent behind us heavy with ashes, while the length ahead gets ever shorter and each path we did not take comes back to hiss and bite, filling our veins with venom. That is life: a corpse that weighs us down, a beast that gobbles us up.
I’ve not turned all of Areemu over. It will work, the Hall-Warden said. So there is a way. Where there is one, others must exist; there is no destination with just a single road toward it.
The largest ruby, red as rambutan shell. Within its facets the last of her life wheels, an orrery of pinpoints in slow orbits. Slower by the day. When it stops entirely she will be beyond revival.
Night or day I keep it by me, as if by the warmth of my skin I may incubate it and hatch Areemu. Night or day I scheme and toil; were I a witch in certain tales sung out in the prairie, I would be hunting down pet foxes and toddlers for their eelish kidneys, their slippery brains. But I am not a story, the nearest village and its clutch of toddlers is too far, and in this matter foxes are of no use. If blood is spilled, it is my own. If carving out my lungs would avail her life, then I would plunge the knife into my breast and call it fair.
Golemry has never ignited my passion, and I’ve taken it up only after Areemu entered my guardianship. Braving the intricacy of her structure humbles and infuriates—I am no artisan; have never been a prodigy. There once existed a record of Areemu’s making, each step inscribed with zealous faith from the first notion, the first sketch; the sisters were meticulous and rightly proud. A decade or so after acquiring Areemu, the princess had this manuscript destroyed and all copies incinerated. Areemu was hers alone; must remain unique. So thorough she was, and so ruthless. No shred of it survives.
The shadow of her malice haunts. The poison of her sneer, long-dead, stiffens the tendons of my wrists.
Areemu’s life dims by the hour.
•
When the gate flares I am alert—intensely alert, for the ruby’s inner orrery succumbs more rapidly now, and I may not waste even an hour on sleep.
The gating sounds as the noise of wave against rock: a sound of home, a sound absent from this land. I am prepared. Who can tell the caprices of a spurned heart; who may say what will bud from a soil of rage?
She grips not her blade or a sorcerer’s whip but the casket of Areemu’s parts and a collection of papers. Ysoreen has been weeping. On skin like hers it shows. Small surprise that in this country they try so very hard not to cry.
“Hall-Warden, the hour is late. My servant is resting, and I fear I haven’t readied any sweetmeats to share.”
“Hang the sweetmeats.” Her voice is hoarse, her hair disheveled. It doesn’t look as if she has been getting any more rest than have I. “I came for something else.”
“Yes?” She must have noticed that Areemu’s core is missing. The consequence will not be light on me. It will not be open to appeal.
“I couldn’t conquer my thoughts of you. I couldn’t extricate myself from them—from you.” Ysoreen inhales. “I cannot permit this to be. One way or another I must have resolution.”
“It will pass, Hall-Warden.” In a year or two she’ll look back and marvel that she ever felt so fiercely.
“I know myself, Mistress Erhensa. This will lodge deep in me, a splinter under the scar. It will prick when I least ex
pect and bleed me from the inside. It will make me weak.” She thrusts the casket at me. “Will you allow me the chance to visit you a suitor?”
I laugh even as my power tautens in readiness. “You aren’t very good at courtship.”
“I’ve never felt the need to practice.” Ysoreen looks up, down, away. “It’s inexact. It’s illogical.”
“Come here, Hall-Warden.”
We are neither of us at ease, at trust; a truce hovers between us but it is cobwebs, it is slivers, it will come apart at a murmur. She approaches, and there is a look about her that she wore when she chased that fox, that owl.
The casket is between us when I clasp her jaw—and she flinches, for now her hands are trapped and her head is in my grip; if I am not half so hale as she nor a fraction so vital, still I am not weak. Ysoreen’s face is broad, eyes deep-set beneath a scuffed brow. A blunt, decisive nose; it is this part of her that I kiss. My halfway offering.
Her eyelids flutter, rapid, against my cheeks. “In the Institute’s archives there is a copy of the sisters’ manuscript.”
Now it is my rhythms which stutter, flung out of cadence. The pages she carries. “Is there. Is it—”
“I told you, golems are my study. I know how to reawaken your daughter.”
I kiss her again, on the lips. It is more calculation than passion, more necessity than desire. In my place any other would’ve done the same. She goes rigid, then pliant, mouth ajar and hot with want. Her clutch at my back, this side of bruising; the taste of her tongue tart.
She is the first to draw away. Though her breathing has gone to rags, there’s a wariness to the tightness of her jaw. Perhaps she is aware—cannot escape—the fact this is a bargain where we put our goods on the table and haggle over the price. Kisses for a resurrection. So cheap; my merchant aunts would’ve shown pride.
Ysoreen gathers herself. “Your need, to fuel the wish. My youth, to replicate the conditions of the original animation. The golem’s first name before the princess, before Areemu. The one you don’t know.” Hunger has ruddied her cheeks. She wants more than kisses; will have more than touches. “The sisters loved her enough to give her a name, to provide a means to restore her.”