The Book of Atrix Wolfe

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He saw the answer in the mixture of fear and astonishment on Hedrix’s face just before the White Wolf began to run.

  Seven

  Saro listened.

  Sound in the kitchen had always been a constantly changing tapestry woven for a moment, frayed, rewoven, with threads spun from the spattering of onions over the fire, the rhythm of mincers’ knives on hardwood, the head cook’s brittle impatience, the undercooks’ feverish hysteria, a peeler wailing, the tray-mistress’s exasperated sibilants, milk scalding, meat spattering down into the fires, wood snapping and groaning, the changing voices of fire as it leaped into new wood, hungry as a spit-boy, or, sated, caressed darkening coals and murmured.

  Everything had a voice; even the dumb, plucked, headless fowl turning on the spits spoke to the fire. So Saro heard everything as the kitchen’s voice. Having no voice, she did not distinguish the sound of the chopping blade from the sound of human voices, unless the particular sound of her name caught her ear. She gave no thought to what might have come out of her own mouth if she suddenly spoke: It might as easily be the thump of kneaded dough against wood, or the clank of a scorched pot kicked across the stones, as any human word.

  But she had a task to do, a pot to scour, and what stuck to the bottom of this particular pot was death. Death appeared constantly in the kitchen: swans and peacocks with their long necks snapped, boars skinned but for their heads, the tusks still bloody from combat, spring lambs, calves, pigs, among the woodland kill of deer, hare, squirrel, doves, quail, grouse, lark. Some came with an arrow in the heart or in one eye; the spit-boys fought the smaller pluckers for the arrows.

  She could not scour this pot clean with a brush. Clean it as she might, the image remained at the bottom: the prince with an arrow of fire in one eye, killed like an animal by a hunter crowned with horns and a black, bloody moon. She could not grasp the image whole, peel it away from the pot, carry it in her hands to show to anyone. It existed only in her head, and to get it out of her head into someone else’s was the urgent task at hand. A pot needed to be cleaned. What was in her head must come out.

  Language did not immediately suggest itself. Like all the lesser minions in constant turmoil subject to the whims of sounds, she responded to anything. Her name was the one necessity. Other words had temporary value. She matched the sound of a voice with the face which needed her: A blackened pan, an expression, told her everything she needed to know. Of the flurry of words that accompanied the pan, one or two might be useful. An outstretched hand with a hot roll out of the oven—a dove that had not kept its shape, or had lost its currant eyes—spoke. An upraised hand, spoon, knife, spoke. A sidelong glance out of a spit-boy’s fire-seared eyes spoke. Everything spoke. She heard what she needed to, in the crook of a finger, the angle of an elbow. It was a language she could speak.

  But nothing the kitchen ever said resembled the vision she had seen in the pot. Nor did the human language, scattered constantly throughout the kitchen, suggest the death of princes. She knew vaguely of the various portions of beef or cooking wine, of herbs and greens and roots; the wood-boys spoke of chopping birch and oak and of every kind of weather; musicians spoke of split reeds and ancient fanfares; she knew the names of limp birds, their plumage bloodied, their eyes misted with something they saw, that were tossed in a heap at the pluckers’ feet. She understood the arrowhead snapped off in the breastbone, the still distant look in the eye. She could have pointed to prince and arrow and eye. But no language she had ever heard had formed a warning in the dirty water at the bottom of a cauldron, and it was that language, she sensed, she needed to speak in order to be heard. A language of wonder and horror that not even the kitchen fire in all its phases ever spoke.

  So she listened. For the first time in her kitchen life she picked out the threads of human voices in the ceaseless warp and weft of sounds. She listened for a tone, a single word, anything which might have bubbled up out of the bottom of a pot filled with dreams, anything which had not been tossed around in the kitchen, day in and day out, since she had come to life beside the woodpile.

  She collected scraps, much as the dogs and the peelers did, as she followed the thread of her name through the maze of sounds. The undercooks, when they had time between meals, seemed to talk of nothing but food.

  “I grated the barest fleck of nutmeg into the raspberry sauce,” the sauce cook said, as Saro dragged a pot past him.

  “A clash of tastes. A brawl,” the pastry cook said.

  “No, no. It encouraged the sweetness of the raspberries. A daring thing, but I chanced it.”

  “So I boiled the boar’s head in a stock of onions and pepper and rosemary; salt I added later, and garlic,” a stew-cook said to another, as Saro came for her stockpot. “I debated raisins and cranberries, but decided on garlic instead, and tiny onions and tiny red potatoes. The brains and tongue are simmering with leeks and cloves.”

  “Twenty-six quail,” the fowl cook said, counting a pile for the head cook. “Eighteen woodcock, thirty grouse, eleven lark, thirteen wild duck.”

  “Pluck them,” the head cook said. “Spit the grouse and woodcocks, braise the lark and quail in butter, stuff the duck with sliced oranges before they are spitted. They will be served with an orange-and-brandy sauce.”

  “Saro!”

  Saro wrested a pan full of burnt butter and sugar from a couple of kitchen dogs. She ate the candied walnut the dogs had missed, before she filled the pan with scalding water. At a vast sink nearby, the plate-washers dipped plates rimmed with gold so gently into water they never splashed. Their hands moved slowly underwater like strange plants in a current that barely rippled the surface as they felt with their fingertips for stains. Unlike Saro in her puddle beside the drains, the plate-washers stood on dry floor; even their skirts and elbows stayed dry. Concentrating, they loosed words as carefully as they loosed plates to the dryers.

  “So he took me into the keep, because no one goes there but the prince.”

  “No. Never the keep.”

  “It was dark and an owl flew at my hair. And then he kissed me. He smelled sweet, like almonds, instead of like smoke and fat, like the spit-boys. And his hands were so soft and smelled of almond oil. He was pulling my skirt up, when something moaned behind me. ‘Ghosts!’ he cried, and left me standing there trying to put myself back into my bodice before the ghosts did it for me. Then I heard the ghosts giggle. I stood still as an owl until I saw them against the open door. And then I screeched and chased them into the kitchen midden.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Pair of mincers. So I don’t know. He’ll never ask me again, surely. He has wonderful eyes. Like bits of spring sky. I might have gotten a coin out of him, but for the brats.”

  “Or maybe not. They speak nicely, some, and they smell like flowers, but they take what they want, and then their eyes never see you again.”

  “Old Ana says she has a charm for that. You mix rosemary, lemon verbena and rose petals, and sew them into a velvet pouch and then you put it under your pillow and dream of him. And then you slide it under his pillow and he’ll dream—”

  “His pillow! How could I get near a hall-servant’s pillow? They live up in an aerie somewhere.”

  “You bribe—”

  “With what?”

  “All right, then. You make a tiny doll of cornhusks, and steal something of his—a thread, a hair—and knot it up in a ribbon around its legs. And you say, ‘No one shall untie this knot but me.’ And then you bury the doll in a bowl of dried lavender. Every night for seven nights you dip your hands in the lavender and hold the doll and say that. And he’ll come looking for you. He’ll come. Because there will be no one else to free his legs but you. And he’ll know you by the smell of lavender, which he breathes into his dreams.”

  “Saro!”

  She found the face behind the voice at the far end of the kitchen, and she hauled a great soup kettle slowly past six vast hearths with the spit-boys crouched along them, faces red
with heat and sweating, turning birds on the spits and dipping into the dripping pans to baste them. They rarely saw Saro; their eyes were for the washers and dryers, the pluckers with swans’ long necks lolling across their thighs. They were wild things, living close to fire; they ate fire, sometimes, when no one was looking. Sometimes they ate birds whole off the spit, and were beaten.

  They spoke tersely, voices at a pitch to carry low and clear from hearth to hearth through the babble above them.

  “That one.”

  “Who? The bone-bundle? Her you want?”

  “No, not Saro, you gizzard.”

  “Saro’s a scrub brush. She’s nothing real.”

  “No one’s talking Saro.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Her. Washer. Look at her hair. Golden as a duck on the spit.”

  “Honey.”

  “Honey in the mouth.”

  “Her. Her with the black hair.”

  “Boner?”

  “Watch her hands, boning that hen. Watch her lift a thigh. Turn it. Twist it. Bend it back. And forth. And back. And then back, and back and back and there—thigh’s loose and sliding in her hand and those fingers holding it.”

  “She’s cutting it.”

  “Watch her face. Stare at her and she looks up. Eyes like smoke.”

  “She clouted me once with her knife handle. She’s too handy with a knife.”

  “What’d you do to her?”

  “Nothing. Just staring. Maybe I dipped my finger in the dripping. Maybe I licked it, staring at her.”

  “Her.”

  “Which?”

  “The plucker.”

  “The skinny one? With her hair like it’s full of dripping?”

  “You can’t see her eyes under her hair. They’re like fire. She’s an ember now, but she flames. She flames. And she doesn’t care about ash on your fingers. The others—”

  “Most others—”

  “They all watch the fine clothes. The flower-eaters from upstairs. The ones who get to see the back of the King’s head when they serve.”

  “The back of the prince’s head.”

  “That was his boar we spitted yesterday. Big. They found his silver spearhead in its heart.”

  “He does magic, the prince.”

  “Up in his tower he does magic.”

  “He could have all of them. Every one of them. Even the tray-mistress.”

  “You gizzard.”

  “What magic?”

  “Spells. He has books. Words he reads and then makes them into magic.”

  “I know what I’d do with a spell.”

  “Every one of them.”

  “Her?”

  “Saro. You gizzard. Saro is a spell.”

  Saro, bending deep into the great wash cauldron, soapy water roiling and echoing around her as she scrubbed, found the odd words echoing in her head. Saro is a spell. Saro is a spell. The rest of what she had heard from the spit-boys made little more sense than the water did, sloshing in the cauldron. The washers were slightly less bewildering. Words hid something, danced around something, slid up to it and away. Something everyone knew but Saro. And whatever it was, they would not say the word for it. They said lavender and ribbons, charms and spells, bodices, boning knives and honey. Chicken thighs, and fire and dreams. But they said no word for the look in the spit-boys’ watching eyes. Something lay beneath words. Something that was not a word, but which made words.

  Something like her dream in the bottom of the pot. There was no word in what she saw: It made words necessary.

  Saro is a spell.

  Up in his tower he does magic.

  He has books. Words.

  Spells.

  Saro is a spell.

  She almost lost her balance, fell headfirst into the cauldron, trying to see herself out of the spit-boys’ eyes, to see herself watching Saro, the spell. After a while the words seemed just another noise the kitchen made. But other words she kept: Books, words, spells. Up in his tower he does magic. Out of his tower he will die.

  Up in his tower he has words.

  “Saro!”

  She pulled herself up, trailing water, and followed the reedy voice of the sauce cook, who had emptied the dripping-pans. He shoved the greasy, soot-coated stack at her. They were still hot; she wrapped her hand in her skirt and, hunched down, dragged them by the lowest handle. She took odd routes, under long tables, so that the cooks and the hall-servants in their purple silks, and the musicians in their reds and blacks, would not trip headlong into duck fat. Pluckers and peelers, idle for a moment, and huddled under the tables, showed little surprise at her passing. Most of them were nibbling: a pared apple, a roasted potato black with ash, a stray bone, a heel of bread. They shifted out of the way of Saro’s pans, but never so far into the light to catch the cooks’ attention. They spoke randomly of everything.

  “My mother was a hall-servant,” a thin blond girl with no front teeth said dreamily.

  “She was never.”

  “She was. She was rich, and she was beautiful. But she died when I was born, and they didn’t have room for me upstairs, so they kept me down here on the hearth. And then they forgot where I belonged. So I got lost down here. But I really belong up there.”

  “Saro was born in the woodpile,” a boy with a runny nose said. He slapped another boy lightly. “Move your feet, you gout, let her by. Those pans are hot.”

  “Saro was carved out of wood,” the blond girl said. “That’s why she’s put together like that. All clumsy and knobby. And why her face isn’t finished.”

  “Why?” the boys demanded. There was a story in her voice, in her slowed, lilting words.

  “Because one day the woodcarver, who used to be the sweeper here, but his back got so gnarly and crooked his chin sank down to his knee and he could no longer see where he was going and where he had been—one day he had a visitor.”

  “A what?”

  “A stranger came, who stopped by the woodpile. The woodcarver couldn’t see him; all he could see was his own face in shiny leather boots. But the stranger’s voice was sweet as honey. ‘Give me the doll you are carving, old one,’ he said. ‘I want to take it home for my child. I will give you money for it.’ But the woodcarver wouldn’t. ‘You have a child,’ he said to the stranger. ‘This is all I have. And anyway I’m not finished with it.’ And so the stranger got very angry—he was a great mage—and he said, ‘Then I will give you a child of nothing, old man, since you gave my child nothing.’ And the wooden doll came alive, all unpolished and knobby, with part of its face still birch bark, and that’s why Saro looks unfinished.”

  “Ballocks,” one of the boys said, after some deliberation. “Tray-mistress says a milker left her there in the woodpile. Naked.”

  Saro tugged the trays out of the chorus of snorts and hiccups, into an oblong of light between tables. The tray-mistress, her shadow flung between the tables over Saro, turned abruptly, a red rose between her teeth. She gestured at one of the hall-servants, who nearly stepped in the dripping-pans before he saw Saro crouched, hauling them behind her. He drew back in horror from the grease, and waited until she disappeared beneath the next table.

  There she crawled through a game played with candle stubs and the knucklebones of pigs. They were rolled surreptitiously across the floor toward a target—the foot of an undercook or a hall-servant—and whoever got closest won. Whoever touched the target lost, especially if it was a hall-servant’s shoe, for then the players were usually routed, and stubs and knuckles flew everywhere. The players, mincers mostly, and on the edge of turning into spit-boys, waited for Saro to pass, shaking wax and bones. They stared longingly into her pans; some scraped crusts into the cooling grease. They spoke little.

  “Him. Pastry. He’s still making diddles out of cream.”

  “Hit him, we’re dead.”

  “Don’t hit him, then,” the player breathed. “Throw.”

  “Wait for Saro. She’s in the way.”

  “Wis
h they’d eat and be done. I could eat ham the size of a chair. A whole cow.”

  “An ox.”

  “They never leave much on the bird bones.”

  “There’s stuffing. Sage, onion, liver—enough to fill a barn.”

  “I could eat it all.”

  “Throw.”

  The knucklebone came within a thumbprint of the pastry cook’s soft leather shoe. Saro heard their breaths gather and still, then fall again, together, as the cook, festooning a cake with loops and swags, shifted and kicked the bone away, never noticing.

  “We could all die.”

  “Him?”

  “Head hall-servant? Hit his velvet shoe with a pig knuckle? We’ll all die.”

  “He’ll swoon first. Throw.”

  Saro emerged into a huddle of musicians. “Fanfares,” they said, “first and second, and third, the one Lefeber wrote, and then, with the first wine, the ancient fanfare of the House, and with the second wine, the Silvan fanfare, which you always take too fast, and there is a rest before the second cadence. Then—” Then they noticed what Saro pulled and they scattered hastily, draping the pennants and ribbons on their long golden horns carefully over their arms.

  She reached the drains finally. She poured scalding water into the dripping-pans, and finished the soup kettle while they soaked. Nothing in its dark, wet hollows revealed anything but more dark iron, more water. She tipped it at last, poured the water down the drain, and set it to dry until it was needed. She turned to begin the dripping pans, and, bending, found herself eye to eye with the sweeper.

  Hunched and shrunken, he seemed in danger of turning into the woodcarver in the plucker’s tale, who had carved Saro out of birch. He seldom spoke, only nibbled what he could salvage out of her pots. His broom, a knobby, crooked staff with a fan of straw on one end, seemed a part of him, worn down to the bone and shiny with age.

  He spoke. “You’re coming alive,” he said. “Your eyes are listening.” He touched his fingers to his lips. “Don’t let them see. You’re someone’s secret. Don’t let them find you alive.”