by Jay Lake
Already Mistress Tirelle pushed me onward. My leaving was not someday, but in that moment.
The central room of the ground floor opened to the courtyard beyond. Hidden folded panels could be fitted in place at need depending on the weather, but otherwise the room’s low seats and padded benches were subject to whatever noise and wind stirred without. A hearth backed this room as well, while the walls were lined with frames and stands representing the tools of various arts. A rack of scrolls and books and bound sheaves of vellum and parchment stood on the west end, a door open in the midst of the shelving.
Still without words, Mistress Tirelle forced me on through.
The last room on the ground level was windowless just as the dining room had been. These walls were padded with a much coarser cloth. The floors were covered with tight-woven straw. No furniture was present except for a low wooden bench that seemed to have been abandoned on a whim. It did not fit the sense of purpose that coiled invisible but strong in the rest of this place.
“Outside, Girl,” Mistress Tirelle growled. I marched a quick step ahead of her fist, until she caught me across my still-bare shoulders. “Do not walk so—it is undignified.”
I bit back a reply. We were on the porch now, in the deep shadows beneath the columned ceiling that was the balcony above.
Mistress Tirelle turned me to face her with a bruising grip on my shoulder. “You will never be in these rooms I have shown you except as part of a lesson. Some Mistress will be with you at all times down the stairs. Do not descend to practice, or seek a lost scarf, or any other excuse which ever enters your foolish head.” She pointed to the end of the porch just outside the empty room. “We go up now. That is where you will sleep, and bathe, and take meals unless you have been brought down here.”
I stared at her, round-eyed and silent.
“You have leave to ask a question, Girl.”
“No, thank you,” I said. Not a question, and so I had pushed past the letter of her word.
She did not strike me for that. So there are limits to her limits. I made careful note of this discovery on the secret list that was already forming deep within me.
Upstairs the rooms were far plainer, though still pleasant and well-appointed beyond anything I might ever have imagined back in Papa’s hut. Neither Federo’s room at the wayhouse nor our cabin on Fortune’s Flight had approached this simple comfort and well-wrought craft.
The deep porch formed a wide balcony, with a few chairs and a table of woven cane and whip-thin wood. All these second-storey rooms opened outward rather than connecting within as below.
A smaller kitchen above the great one would still have served to feed our entire village at home. Walls and floor alike were tiled with ceramic squares painted in the pattern of a lion devouring a snake, which in turn devoured the next lion beyond, and so forth.
The eating room was dominated by a large but simple table polished smooth as the mirrored gloss of the great table downstairs. Instead of the unnaturally detailed silk, these walls were wood that had been washed over with a pale color.
Beside that was a sitting room with a few wooden chairs and small tables, and a smaller hearth than the receiving room downstairs. The two rooms past were sleeping rooms, the one for Mistress Tirelle next to the stairs. I had no doubt she slept with the ears of a bat.
The high-walled courtyard, the baths in a cellar below the great kitchen, a double handful of rooms, and the struggling pomegranate tree were the entirety of my world for a very long time to come. All of it ruled by Mistress Tirelle.
I was clad in simple shifts much the same as what Federo had given me during our travels. There were three of them, and it was my responsibility to keep them exceptionally clean. A speck of dust on the hem, a spot of food on the front, and my ears were boxed or my head slapped.
At the first, we lived only upstairs. Mistress Tirelle was taking my measure in subtler ways than her ungentle prodding in the courtyard that first day. She had me cook, or at least try to. After my grandmother died, Papa had always prepared our rice mush for dinner. Besides which, I been too young to tend the fire.
She had me sew, and was surprised at my skill. The bells that had been between my fingers since before I could remember had taught their lessons well. I did not explain. Mistress Tirelle did not ask.
The duck woman also made a cursory review of the arts of the mind which Federo had begun to teach me, testing my comprehension of letters and simple arithmetic. I was careful not to show more wit than the questions were intended to discover.
Though she carped and grumbled at every little thing, and was quick with a hard hand, I took quiet satisfaction in seeing how little Mistress Tirelle had to complain about. Other than my attitude, of course, which she tried alternately to beat out of me or lecture to death.
I never did bow my head quite deeply enough, or answer quickly enough, or remain quiet enough for her. Mistress Tirelle had spent her life with candidates. She knew how to read the set of a girl’s back. Bidden to silence, in those early days my only weapon was complete obedience combined with a sullen insolence. We both knew it well, and hated each other for it.
So began the years of my education.
______
“First we shall learn to boil,” she told me one day. I had been there less than two weeks and was already keeping a secret tally against the day I found a way to reclaim my silk and bells.
I nodded. There had been no question addressed to me, no permission granted to speak.
“All life came from water,” Mistress Tirelle continued. “Water lies within us all. You spit water from your mouth and pass water from your vagina. So first we cook with water, to honor who we are and make our food separate from the browsing of beasts.” She gave me a shrewd look. “Do you understand?”
I did. Papa had boiled rice after all, though I couldn’t recall having the word boil before beginning to learn Petraean. “Yes, Mistress Tirelle.”
“What is it that we do to boil water?”
“We make a fire beneath a pot, ma’am.” I hastily added, “A pot filled with water.”
“Hmm.”
She wanted some deeper answer, but what I had said was true enough. After a moment, Mistress Tirelle went on: “Later we will discuss the size and shape of vessels, and why you boil some things thus and others so.”
I nodded again. Cooking seemed a strange place to begin whatever journey Federo had set me on, but here we cooked.
She built a fire in a little metal stove. After it was burning well, she drew a knife from within her black wrappings and proceeded to slice a bundle of dark green leaves shot through with pale gray veins. They smelled sharply of a strange yellowy scent on the edge of unpleasantness. “We cut these spinach leaves in order for them to cook evenly.” Something close to a smile quirked across Mistress Tirelle’s face. “Not all is ritual, Girl. Some purposes are as simple as everyday hunger.”
I forgot myself and answered her. “Hunger isn’t simple, ma’am.”
When she struck me with the knife handle, it left a mark on my forehead that was many days in fading.
“Obedience is simple,” the duck woman said, standing over me as I crouched on the floor, swallowing my sobs. “It is also the greatest everyday virtue any woman can possess. Most of all you.”
We cooked. We washed. We swept. We sewed. For a long time, there was no one but me and Mistress Tirelle. Food was brought to the gate and accepted there by her from persons unseen. I then carried it to the upstairs kitchen under her supervision. The slops and night jars went down a drain on the far side of the court, adjacent to the high blank wall of whatever central building lay beyond.
I came to realize there were more courts besides mine. If I stood at the deepest part of the porch, I could see two other treetops. Occasionally a voice would be raised, then break off. I knew there must have been an array of guards and servants elsewhere in this place, but Federo had spoken truly when he told me I was leaving the world to be h
ere. I knew only the company of women, and of women only Mistress Tirelle.
The sun moved, too, growing a bit more southerly in its track across the patch of sky that had been given me. At home, if I climbed a tree, I could see for furlongs on furlongs, across rice paddies to the village and far beyond. Here, there was only a bit of the heavens, cold stone, and air that never tasted right.
The days also became shorter as the sun slid ever southward. The pomegranate came into fruit with the cooler weather. So began my first instruction beyond the basics of obedience and housekeeping.
“One mark of distinction is the ability to choose without seeming, and always be correct in one’s choice.” Mistress Tirelle held a small knife in one hand—I was still not allowed blades at that time. A dozen pomegranates were set before us on the wooden block in the large kitchen downstairs. This was the first time we’d used that kitchen for anything since I’d arrived here, and I was fascinated by all the half-remembered shapes and surfaces.
The fruits were several shades of pale melon red, ranging from unripe to ready to overripe. Some were irregular, their ends lumpy and misshapen. Others were closer to the most ordinary form of the pomegranate.
“Which one, Girl?”
I pointed toward one at the near end of the table. The fruit had even coloring and a pleasing shape. “That one, Mistress.”
She handed me the knife, reversing the blade as she did so. For a moment as the wooden handle slipped into my grasp, I imagined lifting it against her. It would be nothing, the work of a moment. Then she would have my feet out from under me and I would earn the beating of my life.
Instead I sliced open the pomegranate.
The white webbing within spilled out, reddish-purple seeds in their soft cases clinging to it. I touched a few of them, pulling the seeds away from their sticky entanglement.
“A fair choice. You looked well. Now put down the knife and pick a fruit from that basket behind you. You may look for only the count of three.”
I looked over my shoulder to see a basket tucked behind the small block. It was filled with pomegranates. All the fruits on top were unripe, several dusted with some molder.
Quickly I reached in and grabbed a firm one, then rushed to place it on the table.
The fruit was of good color, but the shape was distended, with lumpy ends. “A woman might eat of that,” said Mistress Tirelle. “But you could have done better.”
I wanted to ask how, but I had not been given permission to speak.
“Let us go outside.”
I followed her into the courtyard. The breeze was up a little, with a faint coolness on it I had never felt before. The tree was heavy with fruit. A few more lay on the cobbles around it. Most of the windfall was in the basket in the lower kitchen, of course, picked up by someone other than me.
“You have until the count of three to select one from the tree.”
I looked. There were a hundred in my vision if there was a one. I pointed at a flash of melon-colored flesh halfway up.
“Hold your hand steady,” she said, then fetched a long pole with a little metal basket at the end. I had never seen that tool before. The night sometimes brought so much to our little court.
Mistress Tirelle used the picker to bring down my pomegranate. I could not say how she knew which one, but so far as I could tell, she pulled down mine.
“The skin is split,” she said. “See? There are blackflies within. You will learn to pick well, the first time.”
We went back inside, where she made me eat the spoiled fruit I had chosen. The mealy flesh was bitter enough to bring tears to my eyes while the blackflies stung the inside of my mouth. I had the better of her, though, in that I sucked the flesh off some of the seeds and spat them into my hand, so I could keep them in place of my lost bells.
The following week Mistress Tirelle and I were in the courtyard beneath the shadow of our tree. The air was strangely chilled, the sun a wan and sullen disc in the sky. We were exercising my fruit-choosing skills. She would whip a blind off my face, and I would select a pomegranate with only a moment’s glance. Down it would come, and we examined its defects together.
“See now,” she said, “how much your eyes can know before your mind does. Let that first choice be true, and all else will follow from it. Let that first choice be false, and trouble will out every time.” The duck woman leaned close. “Never allow yourself to be seen to make the effort. It must come from within, on the moment.”
We were interrupted by an iron clangor which took me by surprise. I had not heard that sound once in the whole time since being brought here by Federo. Mistress Tirelle looked up and passed a quirk of her lips.
“Your next Mistress is here,” she said.
For a moment, I thought I might be free of Mistress Tirelle. That flash of elation must have shown upon my face, for her eyes narrowed and the smile that hadn’t truly been there vanished with the finality of a tight-closed door. She drew back her hand to strike a blow, then stayed herself, instead saying, “Come with me.”
We walked to the dark gate through which I had come. The archway was large enough to admit a carriage, but a postern was let within. A bell hung there, which Mistress Tirelle rang once. The door creaked open, and a slender woman of sour aspect stepped through. She was as pale and sharp-eyed as all the other maggot folk of this city, wearing a long apron of dark blue over gray skirts and a gray blouse.
“Girl,” said Mistress Tirelle. “This is Mistress Leonie. She will work with you on your sewing.”
Thus we moved on to the next phase of my education. I was broken to the harness. Now it was time for me to learn my tricks.
I received my first real beating shortly thereafter, upon being cross with Mistress Leonie. She was quieter and of gentler voice than Mistress Tirelle, and so I was lulled into a sense of trust. I’d thought anyone would be better company than the duck woman with her casual cruelties and calculated rages.
My basic needlework having already been established, Mistress Leonie had moved me into different kinds of stitches. We worked with an assortment of needles and types of thread. Some were difficult for me to manipulate. I hissed in frustration during our morning hours one day.
“What is it, Girl?”
“This silly needle slips in my hand,” I complained. “I hate the silk thread.”
“You will do as you’re told.”
“It’s stupid. We can use an easier thread.”
She looked me up and down, then stepped to the doorway and called for Mistress Tirelle. They whispered together a short while. Mistress Leonie came back and resumed her seat with a smirk.
Mistress Tirelle reappeared a moment later with a cloth tube in one hand. It was fat as a sausage and slightly more than a foot in length. “Remove your shift,” she ordered.
I glanced at Mistress Leonie in a rush of embarrassment. I still did not realize what was about to come, and thought only for my modesty. Even that idea was new to me, brought by the language of my captivity and the chilly necessities of life in the Factor’s house here so far north of the country of my birth.
Shrugging out of my shift, I faced her.
“Turn and bend to grasp your knees.”
Mistress Tirelle began to beat me across the buttocks and thighs with the silk tube. It had been filled with sand, then wetted, so it was heavy and struck me with a harder, deeper blow than the flat of her hand could do. I cried out at the first, which earned me a growl to silence and another, sharper blow. She laid into me for the count of twenty. Then: “Don your shift, and continue with Mistress Leonie’s instruction.”
Sitting was agony, but I did not dare show it. As I brought my shaking hands to the needle and thread, I saw the flush on Mistress Leonie’s cheeks. She looked happy.
Thus we went on. Now that the silk tube was out, punishments became far more frequent and for less cause. I was beaten if I used one of my own words. I was beaten if I came late to instruction or the table. I was beaten if I was
thought to be disrespectful, something Mistress Leonie found to be the case at least two or three times each week. If I merely forgot something, Mistress Tirelle beat me for that as well.
Though Endurance had first taught me patience, Mistress Tirelle made that lesson my way of life. The slap of her sandals on the wooden floors took the place of the bell of Papa’s white ox. Her coarse, labored breathing was Endurance’s snorting to call me back, though now the danger was greatest at the center of my life.
The courtyard outside grew ever colder as my first northern winter arrived. Grim rains would set in that lasted for days. I was miserable with the chill. Mistress Tirelle swaddled herself in more wool than ever, but did not bother to offer me anything to put over my shift. I cured my pomegranate seeds in the small warming pot allowed me for the nights, and stole wisps of thread for my silk.
Soon, I would steal the whole cloth. I had only to find a way to distract Mistress Leonie.
______
She had brought a flat chest that opened from the top into a series of drawers like wooden wings spread ever wider. Cloth lay folded within—muslins, cottons, poplins, silks, woolens, and other fabrics—all of it heavy with the smell of camphor and the scent of the cedar wood from which the chest had been made. Some lengths were in colors that might have shamed a butterfly. Others were simple and somber.
“Each of these is as fine as you will discover in any market,” Mistress Leonie said.
I had never been in any market, but she was not interested in the tale of my short years.
“I have shown you how to tell the thread count. With practice, your eye will gauge the quality even from a distance. That is not everything there is to cloth, but it stands for much.” She turned a yard-long run of fine wool over in her hands. “I will bring a loom, for you should see how this is made.” That dangerous leer crept across her face, which spoke of a beating soon to come. “Tell me, Girl, what is the wool I hold?”
That question was a trick, for we had not yet discussed the kinds of wool. But I had overheard her talking to Mistress Tirelle of the materials, and so took a guess from the words I’d heard. “It is cashmere, Mistress.”