by Tom La Farge
Now the basket lay empty save for dead leaves and twigs, crumbs of dirt, and one disoriented earwig trying the gaps in the weave. ’Nna let it catch her finger in its pincer and lifted it to drop and scuttle. All night long the donkey had been near her, far nearer than the man on its back. Shandimus had spoken no more than he did in bed. But the donkey had followed her with careful steps, and where she had paused, it bent to crop. She’d saved it from feeding on barboosh, that looks so much like parsley, and another time from gizgeez that sprouts when grass is still rare. She had guided it to more wholesome fodder, talking to it; but look, here were gizgeez and barboosh, she must have gathered them while she chattered into that long soft ear, telling it about her mother, while above them the Domestic hummed.
Root had liked her voice. He’d asked if she’d worked in the theater. As she sorted, ’Nna thought about that. She made a little pile of poisons, all familiar from Lhool’s stall. Beesh: that’s aconite, one of the most rapid, a blue cluster of flowers and spiky leaves, but it’s the root that Lhool kept pickled in jars on a high shelf, as well as a crock of beesh honey. This is oowriwra, a splay of broad leaves, and here’s the spiky pod protecting the seeds that bring on convulsions. Here’s oofen, whose little blue kidney-shaped seeds will cut off your breath. Booqina: purple berries framed by a star-calyx. A dozen will send a man to death with the hardest cock and brightest dream he ever enjoyed. Tidilla with the white trumpet-flowers wipes memories from the brain. The seeds bring on a good mood at first, next hallucinations, then trance and prophetic visions, delirium and inarticulate babbling, silent sweats, and lastly heart failure, depending on the dose. In the garrison town ’Nna had daily been carrying a twist of tidilla seeds across the lane to men in the café, whose jest it was to reach their dirty hands between her legs and feel if she had hair yet. ’Nna had given such a generous dose to the one who hurt her with his nail that he’d made it right to the sweats.
’Nna tore sheets from a week-old newspaper, when the news had been all of fêtes in honor of Shandimus’ Force. She wrapped a pile of medicinal herbs in the racetrack results. Another closely printed sheet, quotations from the Bourse, enfolded herbs for women, to bring on or suppress their menses, make them gain weight or lose it, put milk in their breasts, kill vermin in their hair, dilate their pupils, stain their lips, clear their skin and firm their gums, add luster to their hair; to prevent conception, ease labor, void fetuses. Sketches of gowns and underwear wrapped aphrodisiacs, the foreign news went around cooking herbs, and the poisons were tied up in the funny papers.
When ’Nna was finished, she searched the kitchen. Root lay on his stretcher, skin like tallow, breath loud. The parrot fanned its scarlet tail and rocked on a hatrack. The chameleon on the rosemary was hunting.
She sang to it as she cut into a cactus pear and left the red slice on the window-ledge, went on singing while she boiled water and chopped. When the cataplasm was ready, she lifted the playwright’s bandage and swabbed off crust and ooze, then bound the gash. The tonic broth was ready; she spooned it in his mouth, singing, the tendons of his neck athwart the tendons of her hand. Then, remembering that the Corsator Annag had caressed her side and that her motorcycle had a sidecar, she hurried out to find her.
A horsefly lit on the fruit and sucked. The chameleon’s eyes swiveled and fixed the fly. The chameleon rose on its bowed green legs, its tail wrapped a sprig, its jaws parted. A tongue shot out and retracted. The fly was absent. The chameleon arched and stretched its gullet, and all the rest was slow, deliberate swallowing.
8.
How The Bits Fit
Root was left lying in the sun. Couldn’t move, didn’t care to. He had been scooped out, carved up, a terrain chopped into plots; plots with different outcomes. Split among tribes. Not at war; just had different customs. The liveliness of Root, though in places intense, did not circulate in such a way as to draw these traditions together. Draw a full-bodied figure, “Root,” against the field? Not yet, couldn’t be done.
The broth he’d taken made a spot of heat, though. Roused him. In some remote bits he could sense an increase in excitement, a crowd’s murmur swelling suddenly. There was some traffic now between his belly and its ripped surface. It was not painless. Around and within the wound Root felt a tunneling of tiny worms through dying or it might be healing tissue. Down the outside of the left leg an avenue of fire fed a combat below his calf, pain assaulting numbness, inflamed ring moving south, tightening above his ankle. There were reverses. He was hot enough now, sweating all right. Yet in his head Root felt well. Two homelands at least seemed to have escaped the war, the fingers of his writing hand and his cock.
Drytung found the Domestic crouching by a shrub. He had resumed the linen jacket, the mushroom-colored hat, and squatted on his bootheels. He beckoned Drytung over. Drytung was weary. He had not slept this last night, not since Annag came back with her work-party. Lamps had been pumped to roaring brightness. Men had hammered nails and shouted. She’d pressed Drytung into writing orders, and he had scrawled at speed while motors gunned and roared off as soon as he’d pressed the sealed wad into the waiting glove.
The sounds of work were still all around, and he’d come into the ruined garden for a smoke and a moment’s peace. The Domestic was this ridiculous kneeling lump of bagging fabric and bristling beard. His mouth hung open, the tip of a very red tongue protruding. Then Shandimus rose. Drytung stared at the Domestic, who had never looked so vivid. In the shadow of his hatbrim the skin of his face was an even green. The projecting bush of his beard glinted red-gold sparks. His garments folded inevitably, his boots bulged with justice. His hands were stuffing tobacco into a black pipe with pinchings and tampings, until with a sweep Shandimus struck a match.
“I have come to understand something about war,” said the Domestic. “Soldiers are men and women, Kyr Drytung. Their commanders also. But armies are beasts. That bee wolf we saw yesterday was an army, Kyr Drytung. It knew no better than to go on licking the honey it squeezed from the bee, while it was eaten from behind by the mantis. An army is that solitary, and solitary beings cannot have experience, only recognition. Experience is contingent, recognition is involuntary and absolute.” Drytung stared. “A human life is a rich fabric of love and interest, not a contour to be identified. It is not a perimeter strong here, penetrable there; not a calculable set of potentialities for aggressive eruption. Those attributes characterize an army.
“Now I must think like an army to fight another army whose behavior I do not yet well know, in order to safeguard the City within whose conversation I locate my humanity. I wish with my whole heart to be a citizen, yet I must remain in the field to fight in the dark.”
“How will you do that?” Drytung almost whispered.
“Last night I went where my donkey took me,” said the Domestic. “We crossed moor, woods, dunes, watermeadow, marsh. Each made a different sound under my donkey’s hooves. I could see very little, truly nothing at all. I felt the direction and force of breezes. The slope beneath me, sounds around me, echoes and responses, all made a sort of map. I began to recognize, not places, but situations, the rhythm of a rustle I had heard before, or a sudden change of temperature.
“Sometimes I climbed down when the donkey halted, to stretch my legs or pass urine, and I would push my fingers into the soil, pull out a handful, crumble it or mold it. I followed veins of clay, marl, loam—damp, crumbling, plastic, gritty earth. This is the science I need now, Kyr Drytung, worm-science, not the engineering of walls. I must plan my battles by crossing the field at night. By thinking, you see, like an army.”
They had to make a circuit round a crater; the dead soldier had been removed from the tree roots and the tree sawn up and stacked. “The family that owns this estate should be willing to sell cheap, don’t you think?” asked Shandimus.
“I thought this was state property,” replied Drytung, astonished.
“Only leased. The V’Arissaroy own it.”
“Will they want to sell?”
“Oh, I think so. Look at the destruction from one night of shelling. There’s hardly a building left intact; they’d have to pull down half the mansion. Besides, I know the family. They bank with us. They’re not well off. That’s how we got the lease for the Wildlife Refuge in the first place. The grandfather served as Prefect of the City; now that’s an office that milks your purse.” They stepped onto the carriageway. “This will all have to be graded and repaved. It wasn’t designed to carry trucks. Look at how Corsator Annag’s motorbikes have torn it up. No, no, they’ll be glad enough to find a buyer.”
“But who will buy?” asked Drytung.
“I’m thinking of it,” said Shandimus. They paced toward the house. “I have a little money put away, and of course the Company Bank will give me a mortgage on favorable terms.”
“Repairs will be costly.”
“Oh, I don’t mean to make repairs, at least not yet. Later, when I come to it, of course I’ll have the resources of the Company. I might even resell the place to the Company as a summer resort. I don’t want to be burdened with land. That’s why I left the Nahloon in the first place.”
“In that case why buy?”
“This estate,” he said slowly, “has a hereditary title attached to it. With that title I can be someone in the City.”
Drytung remembered. “Expansion,” he suggested.
“Exactly, Kyr Drytung! I must be a word in the conversation! Never have I felt that more than now, when I alone stand between it and harm. This damage, this mess,” he declared, “can you imagine the City hurt this badly? And who’s to prevent it but me? The Despot won’t use the Politic companies that could really win, Schools and Mules. He won’t let them out of their barracks because he doesn’t trust their commanders not to supplant him. It’s happened too often before. And so I serve. But the City must not forget me. And some day, Kyr Drytung, I will take my seat in the Senate. They will not wish to let me in, I know. Let us see if they can keep me out!”
They rounded the kitchen wing and drew near to the stand of henna bushes where ’Nna was culling. Shandimus went on talking, his voice still full and carrying.
“I learned a great deal about ’Nna last night,” he said, and she slowed her movements. “She guided me through the night, though I ought to say she guided my donkey, talking to it. She told the donkey all her life before she enlisted in Walls. Her father was a freed slave, black as coal, a sergeant in Mules. He was the muscle for a protection racket among the whores in the City. Then he tried it with one of our tied houses; as if Walls could not protect its girls better than an oaf from Mules! We had him shipped out to a garrison in the northwest, where he promptly got with child the commandant’s favorite woman: ’Nna’s mother.
“She was a piece of work. I remember hearing stories about Lhool from Bitwak himself. A beauty if you like that sort, a tribeswoman, large and coarse and slow. White, but not very. Bought from her parents to serve the garrison, but too many of her clients got sick in ways the army doctors couldn’t fix. Then Bitwak bought her for his own use. He somehow tamed her, or so he thought. He boasted that she had helped him settle grudges and pay back favors. Then this sergeant got to her. After he was castrated and cashiered, Bitwak had to let her go. Actually he manumitted her. I think he was scared.
“She set up a stall in the market. As an herbalist: oh, yes, our little ’Nna does not come by her knowledge innocently. The police heard of the mother frequently. ’Nna grew up hard enough. The mother didn’t care to have a swarthy little imp around. ’Nna got out as soon as she could support herself. Worked the theaters, kept clean, did some cooking. When she was fourteen The Campfollowers’ Bandum recruited her. She quickly made her way. I have been fond of ’Nna.
“But now I’ll have to let her go. Her mother used to send her to the cemetery to dig things up, Kyr Drytung! Hands that have touched what Nna’s hands have touched can never be made clean. Once she had to help to steal a baby. Only she could hold it so it wouldn’t cry, so she told the donkey. Sneaking through her entire childhood, there’s no way she can get over that.
“A life like hers cannot expand, Kyr Drytung. I am sorry I brought her into the field. I will have to cut her loose. I can’t have a fortune like hers as a drag on my future.”
They turned the corner of the house. Annag was there, washing at the pump. She had tossed away her tunic and now bent, slapping cold water at her torso. Her fine fair hair lay lank along her back. Drytung had never seen skin so white. Her forearms were ruddy from the sun, but her upper arms, her shoulders, breasts, and neck shone like alabaster, a fine-grained mineral purity. ’Nna came trotting up behind her, her skin matt to soak up sunlight. ’Nna passed, let no one catch her eye, walked into the broken house.
Root, who’d heard it all through the holes in the wall, watched her walk to her table and begin to sort, wash, chop, measure. Her mouth was closed, but her eyes were open. So ’Nna had been exposed. Trailing all that behind her, no wonder she’d been such a cheerful servant, always ready at your side, invisibility with a warm smile. Happy to be there. No more of that.
Root reinvented ’Nna on the spot as the performer he’d need for this new theater. He could see her coming out of, going into, the connection of the unseen with the stared at. Now her lips parted. How she sobbed! He must attach her, possess her, direct her. ’Nna’s gullet must swallow the voices of thousands and utter hoarse truth.
9.
The Spice Map
Weeks later, Root watched the sun set behind the tomb of a forgotten saint. That’s the sort of theater war is, episodic.
Not much going on in this episode. He remembered the Ghazawa Pass and sat up, looking around the hospital truck. Twelve bunks, two empty. Others would vacate soon. He was starting to hope he might keep his till they got to the City. Two more days, Drytung said. It was good all the same to be at rest. The journey off the Hook had not gotten smoother, only much slower, when the truck broke down and had to be hauled by a muleteam. Drytung had led the convoy out, across the Cut, then into the range of hills behind the Bay. The road went twisting along near the crest of the ridge, diving into dry gullies filled with thorns. Hard going; he’d brought the column down here by the sea to rest and reprovision at the Judwal market.
Now, since the canvas had been unlaced from either side of the truck and staked out in canopies, the seabreeze could clear out the septic stink, and Root could see. He looked inland. The broken men and women of Shandimus’ Force were dispersed across a stony slope. Some drab tents had gone up to shudder in the breeze, but most bodies lay on dirt, fitting themselves as best they might between outcroppings and buttoned into their coats. Among them a small shape moved, ’Nna’s, dispensing what comfort she could. She had turned up an hour before, riding in Annag’s sidecar.
Behind, where the ground began to rise, Root saw more soldiers strung out along a goatpath leading toward the twist of smoke that marked a village and fires lit for the commune’s baths. He could not see that the soldiers were moving; nothing seemed to stir in that rising field of brown, from which no shape emerged without being searched for. The terraced village blended into barleyfields that would turn yellow-green come spring but now were nothing. Stalled donkeys and sluggish goats, peasants and soldiers trudging to bathe, showed less life than the woodsmoke billowing from a hole in a wall of mud.
He turned the other way to look into the market, where there was more to watch. Right below him, in the shade of the canopy, Drytung and Annag were sitting at a café table, drinking wine. Annag had her shoes off, her feet on a chair, and she was leaning back, tunic unbuttoned, quite as if they were a couple enjoying a glass before dinner; but Annag and ’Nna were the couple these days; that was how ’Nna had kept her uniform after being discarded by Shandimus. Behind them rose the market, a square enclosed on three sides by a building parceled into narrow stalls; back of that loomed the forgotten saint’s domed shrine. The market tu
rned its back on sea and saint as affairs beyond the scope of the commercial.
Business had been brisk since the column arrived. Beneath a bower of palm fronds gone grey and audibly the home of beetles, a young woman was poking at a long iron trough, from which smoke drifted up and ashes sifted down. The platters lined up on the grill puffed out seasoned vapors as she lifted their conical lids. Then she sauntered to the spice merchant for scoops from the vivid mounds in front of his stall, where a stuffed hoopoe stared and a living falcon dozed in his leather hood. Root lost her buttocks in the dark interior, but past the spices there were carpenters planing and sanding, sanding and planing. Three men sat sewing in the tailor’s; he watched their right hands all sweep up together. A soldier was having his head shaved in the barber’s while others waited, calling out suggestions to the blacksmith’s boy as he struggled to straighten the fork of a bicycle. Then the blacksmith himself marched out with a bag of tools, made for the truck, and plunged beneath the hood.
A vine shaded the butcher’s stall where a lacy ribbon of tripes swung from a hook, and from another hook a chicken, with a bush of parsley sprouting between its plucked legs. On the counter a ram’s head rested on two twisting downsweeps of horn, flies busy around its blind eyes. Elsewhere lopsided pots stood about, tattooed in mad zigzags and overflowing with flowers. In the middle of the courtyard water simmered in a cauldron, and a carpet of herbs spiraled as Jbeeba, the truck’s one-armed driver, squatted stirring. Then she stood and pulled out a length of muslin on her stick, and looped it on a line to dry.