by Tom La Farge
’Nna was by him, crosslegged on the floor. She had taken off the brown robe and was sewing makeshift buttons on her tunic, where the silver tower of Walls gleamed on the collar. Was using, he noticed, the very needle and thread that had sewn up his gut.
“What’s that bruise?” he croaked. She told him the story of the four soldiers and smiled. There was something in her voice: soft, rasping, but it carried. “Say something more. Tell me who you are.”
“Trooper ’Nna of Walls, Campfollowers’ Bandum, Cook’s Unit,” she said triumphantly, putting on her tunic, whose buttons appeared to be animal teeth. Root fancied that her voice raised an echo in some of those other chambers.
“Have you ever played in a theater?” he wondered.
“Only in the lobby.”
To be sure. Trolling for custom. He plucked at the stifling rug.
“Are you hot?” She felt his forehead with a chilly hand. “I must make you something stronger. I’ll need herbs from the woods.” She broke off, hearing voices downstairs. “I’ll be back!” she promised. Root’s eyes had already closed, and he followed I’ll be back! as it ran off through suites of rooms, ringing out in stranger and stranger inflections till no words could be made out but only a ground of will—hungry, searching.
Drytung was working to tidy up the garden when the Corsator’s motorcycle chugged across the lawn and quit. He walked back to the broken house. The bike and its sidecar, in which he’d spent three days hoping for love, stood alongside a donkey that had turned up. Annag’s voice rang out through a gap. Drytung stepped into a roofless hall that must, from the quantity of shattered glass on the floor, have been a conservatory.
Trees stood about in great tubs; beneath a warty and fat-trunked one, Shandimus sat. Annag perched on the edge of another tub, and ’Nna was coming downstairs. The Domestic still had his stewbowl in his lap. A lynx had its paws on his knees and its tongue in the bowl, and he was stroking its fine pelt, gold marked with amber. A little brown monkey with blonde eyebrows sat at his feet, clutching an opened can of army jam, and on the Domestic’s shoulder there rested a gray parrot with a scarlet tail. The parrot nibbled his earlobe while he attended to the Corsator’s report. ’Nna punctured a can of condensed milk for the lynx and handed the monkey a spoon.
To get a smile, Drytung offered Annag a cigarette, lit it, then sat down across from her.
“I’ve been all over,” she said. “The situation’s bad, but not as bad as it could be. Not that many killed or hurt. The roads are clogged with deserters and stragglers. They’re scattered all over and have dumped their heavy weapons.” She named commanders she’d contacted, made estimates, their numbers, our numbers. “Everyone reports hearing foreign languages and seeing odd uniforms. Rhem was ready for us, and she had help, from the foreign Republics we think. Volunteers, adventurers, Old Believers trained as commandos, and then that battlecruiser that shelled us here.” The monkey dropped the jam and climbed the Domestic like a tree, jumping to his free shoulder and then to the branch above his head.
Drytung studied Corsator Annag of the Company of Stables. She had brought him in her sidecar from the house where he’d been quartered. Her house that had been the V’Detsinoy manor. He had spent a week alone in a great gallery with crates of files, ordered to write up the deployment of Shandimus’ Force. Around him in glass cases stood thousands of human and animal figures in naked gray terracotta, a society of six-inch figures arranged in tableaux that lent meaning to their gestures. When evening light flooded in, it raised a glow in their flesh and sharpened the brim of a hat, shaded a nostril, limned a smile. He’d had no other company.
At table, the single night the V’Detsinoy asked him to join them, he had thought Annag no more than a daughter of the family, another meaty, mannish girl with perfunctory eye-makeup and ashen hair caught anyhow in a clasp; a loud laugher. It had been the other daughter he hoped to meet: the beautiful, refined Lakikia, who almost married the Despot. She wasn’t there, though he learned that it had been she who assembled the collection of terracotta figures, mostly dug up around the estate.
After dinner Annag had taken his arm between her strong hand and trammeled bosom, walked him out to the balcony, and there informed him that she was Corsator Annag, “with Stables,” and his transport next morning to the Wildlife Refuge. Stables was another of the Politic Companies. The corps was formed under one of the last emperors, who loved the hunt more than his empire and added wings to his stables while provinces dropped away. He had held court among his horses, finding his loyal Oykies among the wellborn young. “They should call us the Unstables!” Annag had giggled as they walked on the terrace. “We aren’t much for discipline, but we do all the dirty work. Spying, deciphering, carrying messages. Keep our ears open in the houses we’re invited to: in the parlor and the bedroom. Assassinations. Long-range reconnaissance. Raids on enemy supply lines. ‘Going shopping,’ we call it. My family sends someone to Stables every generation.” Drytung had seen them everywhere as aides-de-camp, laughing and snooping. Whenever a field commander was handed a despatch, the goggled kid on the rattling bike had a silver horseshoe pinned somewhere or other.
Annag had worn her uniform the next day, tunic mostly unbuttoned, when they set out for what should have been a two-hour run; but the attack had opened. It took three days to bring him to the gates, and in that time Drytung had convinced himself he was in love with her. How could he not adore her insouciance, cursing and singing as she searched for clear roads or mended her engine? She was so removed from the mess, the noise, the damage, the frustrations. They’d spent a night inside a hollow tree, her back warm against his, and he not daring to turn and throw an arm around a V’Detsiny, though the smell of her turned his head.
“We’ve heard from their command,” she told Shandimus now. “The terms offered are harsh. Immediate unconditional surrender. Rhem guarantees repatriation of rank and file, but all officers and specialists remain as hostages. Cession of the Hook from the Cut clear to Rhem, which asserts her sovereign independence. Old Believers to be tolerated throughout the Despotate. All trade with the Republics to take place in Rhemot bottoms. All pilotage and fisheries reserved to Rhem. Despot to purchase twenty thousand tons of sea-salt annually.”
The parrot turned its crested head and whistled. ’Nna had found some nuts and offered them. They were well received. Annag looked the Domestic directly in the eye.
Shandimus said: “Where do bees go when the hive has been destroyed?” He paused and looked at each of them in turn, as if this were a staff meeting to plan strategy. “I know how they live in the hive, but where do they go, and how do they find their way? I must learn that.” His eyes rested on ’Nna. “I must change my plan; I have put my faith in walls, and now I must know the field outside them. You shall take me there, Cunt ’Nna. Wisewoman, don’t you need more herbs?”
She smiled, delighted. “Domestic, the herbs I need must be gathered at night.”
“All the better. We will stroll in the fields at night.”
“The woods. Most herbs grow there.”
“And how do you find them in the dark?”
“By their smell.”
Shandimus smiled. “Sniffing around the woods! Bees, I am sure, do no less. Yes, we will do things bee-fashion now. We will follow fragrance and choose our ground with a bee’s care.
“Corsator Annag, here are your orders.” The Corsator rose, quick as a mongoose. “We do not accept the enemy’s terms. If you know where to deliver this message, do so; if not, they will learn the fact soon enough. Find all of our troops you can and send them here. We muster the day after tomorrow.”
“At your orders, Domestic. But we’re wide open.”
“Yes,” smiled Shandimus.
“Let them start shelling again, and…”
“…and they will find no target. The walls are all broken!”
After dark ’Nna led Shandimus off on his donkey. Drytung stayed; the truth was
that he feared to go out into the dark. For a while he gazed at the parrot sleeping head under wing. There were growlings from outside. Drytung went into the kitchen and sat by the fire; a stronger blaze and he’d have light to write by. He built a pyre of chair-parts, till the glow spread. Looking around, he saw a broad leaf-shape clinging with closed eyes to the potted rosemary on the ledge. Yellow against the night: a chameleon, its tail coiled tight. He opened his bag and pulled out DRYTUNGS BOOK. Found his pen and sat.
And as he wrote, he thought of ’Nna slipping through the night alongside the Domestic’s donkey, following airs and soils. He conceived a garden with no paths but those, a place where the violent various traffic of the earth flows within unseen bounds. Is it possible to find a balance between paths seen and paths smelled out at night? An imagination that blends both? It was possible to wish for it, and Drytung did.
7.
Night Reconnaissance
The next day the rubble was cleared from ’Nna’s kitchen. The stove got put back in its place, and a fire was lit in it. They carried Root down on a stretcher to get warm. The Corsator Annag directed the work, and at her orders two large tables were assembled for ’Nna. Annag smiled like a shark when thanked and, leaving, brushed ’Nna’s flank with her fingertips.
Now the basket of plants rested in the sun. ’Nna touched the handle. The uppermost plants had been the last she’d torn from the earth before daybreak. She’d hardly seen those, but underneath, their scents rising, lay packed scores she’d never seen at all but snatched at a venture, running her thumb across a leaf she then had crushed beneath her nose.
Only yesterday she’d mended her uniform and taken back her place in the army. What was she afraid of now? Not night or wilderness, she was at home there, but somehow absent here. She reached into her tunic to find a body and touched hot, sore skin. Better than nothing; ’Nna struck out, digging into the basket till she’d cleared room around a plant she knew at once, naa’nna. Singing “Naa’nna,” she spread mint on the table, smoothing out the oily leaves. Her own plant, and she chewed it. Cool, peppery, it bit into the bind on her spirit, scoring it, weakening its grip, till all unraveled and was spat, yellow and green, out.
She reached in and found tmer. Those pods’ gluey pulp would go into the infusion of naa’nna. Root was possessed with the zinn of fever, whom it is the virtue of tmer to choke.
The words that told her so were her mother’s, Lhool’s. That dry voice, speaking now in ’Nna’s innermost ear, had in the past told her all about the world of demons called znoon that possess a human body and spirit, and what plants could break their hold. But that very voice was Lhool-as-zinniya. ’Nna would never rid herself of Lhool by listening to her; a place in the army would not still that voice. And yet, to make her cure, she must go her mother’s way and use Lhool’s lore; and she so hard of study! So forgetful, so unmindful; so often pinched and scorned. ’Nna felt bruises swell as she fingered leaves. Each of the plants she pulled into light reserved its virtue for another body, not hers. As she listened to Lhool tell her what each was and what it cured or caused, her scalp crawled, hair grew up her belly and down her legs, her womb filled with tumors, the little courses of her breasts dried up, her skin cracked. ’Nna’s spirit issued in spirals binding one another like vines, trailing after her mother as Lhool stalked off to mischief.
But ’Nna had an officer to heal. Like a gallant officer in a grey cutaway with scarlet tails, the parrot flew in and landed on the meathook that hung from the ceiling.
’Nna took courage and dug into the basket. She found taateel and pulled it from the basket. Good. Now chop the leaves and mix them in fat. Just then, as it happened, two of Annag’s men shouldered in an enormous joint that they jammed onto the hook, sending the parrot squawking. A haunch of camel, wholesome fat. Good. She would make a cataplasm. Taateel’s bark and some more leaves, ground and molded into a compress, would bring Root’s inflammation down.
Lhool’s daughter chose leaves, her fingers stripped bark and sorted the trimmings into two piles, one for chopping, one for grinding, while knowledge worked upon ’Nna and pulled her into shame. When ’Nna had newly enlisted in the Campfollowers, she had draped herself on a mudguard in the Motor Repair Shop. So braced, she had let mechanics take their lunchtime pleasure, while her eyes followed sparks shooting from a welder’s torch. That life had still been easier than being the daughter of Lhool. It had set her in a place she preferred to streaming behind her mother into the night, the fields, the desert, the hills, the neighbor’s orchard, the narrowest alleys lined with low back doors. Better be a cylinder for some trooper’s piston than catch sidewise glances from Lhool’s bruised lids or a clubbing from those ringed fingers.
At the corpse washer’s ’Nna had taken a dead man’s hand in her own and pushed it into a bowl of moistened grains. She had left it while her mother sang a counting spell in a little girl’s voice. Those grains later made part of a savory stew served to a husband whose wife would have no trouble with him after that. The touch of the cold hand had made ’Nna’s redden and swell; but a compress of tiklilt cured it.
Tiklilt is a kind of chamomile. She had some in her basket; she could make a compress for Root’s head-wound if she added ground leaves of tirtta. And addool, a kind of acacia, “take it where you find it.” ’Nna would grind the bark of addool in the same mortar as tateel, to disinfect the playwright’s wounds. “Addool and tateel are a pair of hands.” Next, the tirtta. Azwiwel: the flowers rubbed on wounds makes them close up like clams. Merriwoot: lends spirit, chases fever. Next, her fingers found aazukni. ’Nna put the leaves in the sun. When dry, she’d shred them, mix them with tobacco, roll them in paper for Root to smoke and forget his troubles.
A scaly branch was caught in the weave of the basket. ’Nna tugged it free, then held up a writhing spray of aammaay, the tamarisk. Its bark too cleans the blood. ’Nna used it, it works against yeast.
She was pleased at what she’d found. Across the kitchen Root lay, a pale, sweating body on an army stretcher. The skin around his eyes was bruised darker than her hand. He was a man of the theater. She wondered what he saw.
To approach him, ’Nna assumed the bluff mien of her mother at her stall. Lhool, an army whore in her day, had joked like a soldier with the men and women who stayed for a story, old men and young women, and all the hunchbacks, cripples, amputees, dwarfs, walleyes, splaytooths, sevenfingers, cretins, lepers, and syphilitics of that garrison town. On market days Lhool wrapped her torso tight and dispensed prescriptions in tales of wicked spirits and worse women. She told these while crumbling, pestling, pouring, weighing, stirring, straining, decanting, her fingers folding powders into papers while her eyes, kohl-lined and shining, held the customer’s. Her voice submitted to a cadence; the story spun itself out, and then the medicament was ready, and everyone laughed a long coarse laugh.
’Nna knelt by the stretcher and took Root’s hand to check his pulse. A playwright. His fingers were cold and chapped, so she unbuttoned her pantaloons and folded back the flaps, then tucked his fingers inside her.
Behind her the basket gave off smells of the field. All last night she had stumbled through darkness with only seabreeze to steer by. In thick groves even that had failed her, and she had stood in stuffy gloom with fireflies traveling everywhere, leading nowhere, lighting nothing. Nearby the Domestic’s donkey farted and trampled bracken, while the Domestic hummed and waited for her to sniff out a path.
Around her the forest had sweated liveliness in fragrances impossible to sort. Each herb, fruit, pulp, and gum was masked by others in the field of odors. ’Nna’s nostrils had flared wide, as wide as when Lhool pushed wads of mint into them and mocked their breadth and darkness, while ’Nna inhaled and sharpened her sense to a pig’s.
Alongside the patient donkey she had turned her head, wondering, Why are there places for plants to proclaim themselves and none for me? Then her broad nose had sniffed out taggalt, the great fennel. Her moth
er would cut into the root-base to bleed it of the milky gum faasookh. Cooked, it clotted, turned creamy chestnut, smelled of caramel. Lhool used it to keep her pubis bald. Later she sold faasookh to assassins; its smoke repelled good people’s guardian saints. ’Nna had taken it, here it was: faasookh.
Shook, the donkey-thistle, Lhool had used to abort what would have been ’Nna’s sister. ’Nna had some of that too.
The parrot whistled. ’Nna gently pulled Root’s fingers out, and he smiled. A man of the theater.
Buttoning, ’Nna imagined a contained space, odorless and cunningly lit. Within it light flowed from many sources through gradations of intensity and warmth, mixing with objects and their shadows. Daylight flooded that space, or lamplight carved it. Firelight warmed it. The white glare of limelight ballooned there, the pearly glow of mist spread. Or the walls were freckled with the exhausted fire of remote stars, the contained darkness was pierced by the thin beam from a lantern or made to swell and shrink by the pulse of embers, or enchanted in muted silver mirror-light.
She sorted plants, recalling. At thirteen, just escaped to the City, she had worked a theater lobby. She’d arrived early once, while the actors were still playing, and in exchange for a minor favor, the usher had posted her where she could watch. Far away the stage had glowed, emitting cries and strings of words. A hall of eyes were catching at shapes clearer than they were used to seeing.
How many places a stage contains! Merely to stand in one of them, under those lights, would give a person a glow and a shadow, marry her skin, hair, and costume into something as distinct as a fragrance in the field. The light would sculpt her gesture and carry it to witnesses. From that place she could throw the voice it would raise in her throat, mantled in words not Lhool’s. Then she would move and be in a new place, from that throw a new voice to ears turning like nostrils to catch her finest throb. Always moving farther along.