by Jay Lake
I nodded, still not meeting her eyes. Was this new Mistress a fearsome queen of arms? Or some mighty priestess with a hex in her milky eyes? Mistress Danae’s stories were full of such women, strange beyond measure and powerful in quiet ways that escaped the notice of most men.
Mistress Tirelle led me downstairs, through the receiving room and to the practice room. I followed with my head still bowed, my face hidden, until I was looking at my feet, streaked with dirt, standing on the straw padding of that place.
“Girl,” the duck woman said in a voice overloud with the pitch of fear, “this is the Dancing Mistress. Mistress—ma’am. This here’s our Girl. The candidate of the Pomegranate Court.”
“Thank you, Mistress Tirelle.” The Dancing Mistress’ voice was deeper and rougher than I had heard before among women. I raised my eyes and looked up at someone too tall, too thin, covered with fine fur, a tail whicking behind her. The tips of claws peeked through her oddly blunt, wide fingers.
Dangerous, monstrous even.
A shriek rose up within me. The Dancing Mistress touched her mouth with her finger in the simplest of shushing motions. Her gesture was so unexpected that it distracted my panic, as she must have known it would.
Not a monster, I realized, but someone who was far more different from me than these pale maggot people of the Stone Coast. Her ears were high on her skull, set back with small round flaps above them almost like a mouse. Her forehead was high, over water-pale violet eyes in a pointed face descending with a mouth split wide as mine or anyone else’s, rather than the fanged triangle of a beast. Her nose was flat, but also human rather than animal.
What had startled me most was the silver fur that covered all of her that I could see. People could look like anything, be many colors and sizes, but no person I had ever seen or heard of was covered with such fine and beautiful fur. Nor did people have tails that swept to the floor, as the Dancing Mistress most certainly did. At the same time she was clearly a person, clad in a wrap of blue cotton printed with a subtle flowered pattern. The clothing covered her bodice and hips, just as any lady would take care to do.
“I am a woman of my people,” she said quietly. “Your kind refer to us as pardines. I am come to live among the humans of Copper Downs and work for my own living. I teach girls and women, and a very few men, to dance, to walk with grace and balance. Sometimes they learn to move so fast and fall so far that they can avoid the sorts of pointed dangers that come driving out of the shadows of great houses.”
I stared. No one had ever before surprised me so much that they stole all the words from my mouth.
She stepped away from me and sat on the little wooden bench of the practice room. Mistress Tirelle had departed without me taking any note of her movements. “We shall require mirrors here, I am afraid.” The Dancing Mistress seemed regretful. “Now tell me of yourself, Girl.”
“I am to speak?” I almost choked on the words.
“Yes,” the Dancing Mistress answered. “You are to speak.”
“I . . . I am a girl of my people.” I took a deep breath. For the first time since being brought here, I would risk the truth. “Stolen away to live among the enslavers of Copper Downs and work toward my own freedom.”
Blows did not fall. Nor shouting, slaps, shoving. Instead a deep wave of melancholy passed through the Dancing Mistress’ angled violet eyes. She opened her arms, and I stepped into them—to be clasped by friendly hands for the first time in my recent memory.
I did not sob into her fur, though I mightily wished to do so. I just let her hold me a moment while my breathing steadied.
“Girl,” she finally said. “Your thoughts are your own. I do not blame you for a syllable of what you said. But if you value your life, and any power you may ever hope to grasp hold of, keep those words within you and never let them out again among these walls.”
Her words were a scrap of hope fed to a starving girl. “Yes, Mistress,” I muttered, then pulled away from the fur and cotton of her shoulder. “What is it you are here to teach me, please?”
She looked surprised. “Why, dancing, of course.”
We danced awhile.
I could not see how to make another belled silk and keep it a secret. Instead I began sewing one in my imagination. Each night before I slept, I would count the bells of my life to date. First there were the simple tin bells of my time with Papa. Then there were the scrap iron bits of my voyage with Federo. Then there were the pomegranate seeds of my months in this house.
In my mind they all rang, even the wood and iron bits. Each night after I had counted them all to the best of my recollection—some spans of days I had to guess at—I would make a game of sewing another one on. Because it was only in my head, I could use needles of bone or ivory, steel or wood; likewise the thread was as I decided it was.
The important thing was to keep the count. In the Pomegranate Court, weeks were marked by the pattern of daily lessons, and by the delivery of certain foodstuffs. We kept no calendars. The count of my bells was the count of my days, and how else would my spirit know the way home when I was done with my life?
I never breathed a word, said nothing to anyone, even the Dancing Mistress. I could not do this thing without punishment falling so hard upon my shoulders that I would bleed rivers.
Even so, she was a hidden friend to me through the darkest days of my second winter and the wet, gloomy opening of the spring that followed. The one hour of any day where I could speak even the least portion of my mind was in the practice room with her. We worked on steps, balance, how I walked, my sense of my body and the space it filled. Sometimes it was truly dance, but more often it was just movement.
“Most people think of their bodies as being flat, like a drawing of themselves,” she told me. “Imagine that you made a paper poppet, and moved it about on a little stage. Except it’s not at all true. You have depth. Your heels and elbows swing back. When you turn, there is a curve your body fills in the space around you.”
While the words made sense to me, it was hard to understand the idea that lay beneath. She set me to skipping rope—a pastime of which I had never heard—first forward, then backwards. To hop as the rope came down behind me required that I know without looking where both the rope and my feet were.
This was much like Mistress Tirelle making me pick fruit with a single glance, or Mistress Leonie’s endless tutelage on the niceties of seams. I had to see beyond what lay before my most casual gaze, to what was really there, as invisible to the eye as my own back was.
These lessons were strange, and quiet, but soon enough I could feel the grace they lent me. I could catch a dropped knife in the kitchen before it struck the tile, leap down the stairs from the balcony to the lower porch. I found I was strong, too. Very strong, the Dancing Mistress told me—more even than most boys. How was I to know? She helped me learn to use that advantage as well. Once the weather cleared a bit, I was able to climb the pomegranate tree speedily and without fear.
For that feat I was beaten so hard, I could not walk for two days. Mistress Tirelle and the Dancing Mistress had an argument, the only one I ever heard between them. Then the duck woman came waddling into my sleeping room. “This is your place,” she said quietly. “Do not look over the walls, do not peek out the gate.”
I forgot myself again and blurted out, “What is beyond, that I should fear it so?”
Mistress Tirelle pretended not to notice my infraction. “A world you will see when it is your time. Girl, you are being made ready for greatness. Let that making unfold in the way your teachers know best.”
Like Federo, she believed my being here was for the good of all. How could they think such a thing?
Spring became summer, the rhythms of the seasons continuing to mark my time in the Pomegranate Court. All I remembered from my earliest days was the endless heat and the sun pouring like a golden hammer upon the land. Here the heavens were a clock, a slow march of the long now following the course of plowing, planting,
harvest, and fallow.
Not that I’d seen agriculture. Only my one pomegranate tree carrying its hidden burden of seeds, now lost like my bells, but far more likely to return. Once the art of reading had settled into my head, Mistress Danae showed me ever more books. Among them was a treatise on farming, The New Horse-Houghing Husbandry. This was the first truly old text I’d read. The book took me weeks on end to puzzle through, and I understood perhaps only one part in five.
Still, I had been born into the practice of farming. Papa and Endurance worked the paddies, brought in the rice, trod the husks. I recognized some of what Tullius, the author of this book, was describing. My interest was born of that—an echo of the familiar, mixed with stories of princes and battles and demigods and the colors of the world.
The other thing I learned from Husbandry was that the very speech of people could change over time. There were seasons to language, just as there were seasons to the years or to the lives of women. I went about for a while muttering in archaic Petraean, though I never had the nerve to answer Mistress Tirelle or my other instructresses in that form.
My lessons moved downstairs as well. We began cooking in the great kitchen more often. The selection of vessels, utensils, spices, and cooking methods was much more varied than upstairs. Mistress Tirelle and I broke our fasts there almost all the time. Some days we also took quick, simple midday or evening meals there. More to the point, downstairs was where I explored what could be done with food. The lessons were simple at first, but it was already clear to me that there might be no end to them if someone had the means to spend their lives in a glorious kitchen.
One day we were washing earth pears—small wrinkled lumps with purplish skins and hair-fine roots branching off them.
“This root must be cooked over a hot fire or on a high boil for at least ten minutes,” Mistress Tirelle said.
Nothing was ever written down. I was simply expected to remember. The array of details in the kitchen was staggering.
I clasped my hands briefly. This was how I indicated I wished to ask a question regarding whatever lesson was under way.
“You may speak, Girl.”
“What will happen if it is eaten raw, or poorly cooked?”
She gave me a long look. “A person could become quite ill, or even perish.”
It had never occurred to me that food could be a weapon. “So the earth pear is harmful?”
Mistress Tirelle put down her root and dried her hands. “Girl, your question runs ahead of your learning, but I will answer it nonetheless. Everything can do harm. The oils we use for frying would ruin your digestion if drunk down like wine. If I made you eat salt until you gorged, you would die of thirst soon after. Some herbs, or things that resemble herbs, can kill even as a small pinch of powder.”
“Then this art is like all the others I study.” I waved the earth pear in my hand to point around the great kitchen. “It is not that I should cook. It is that I should know cooking so well that I can see when someone is trying to poison me with salt or bad oils or the powder of killing herbs.”
Mistress Tirelle’s ghost of a smile briefly returned. “Federo chose you well, Girl.”
I looked down at my earth pear and wondered how I might feed it to her. Words, I reminded myself. You will triumph with words.
The lesson was clear: Anything could harm, if used in a certain way. Food. Words. A length of silk sewn into a tube and filled with sand. Even a person.
Are they training me to live well? Or to know different ways to kill and to die?
My lessons changed as the seasons did, along with the lengthening of my legs. Mistress Balnea brought the promised horse into the courtyard one day, and we began the study of the living animal instead of the illustrated scrolls and parchments. Our example was an old brown mare with a white blaze on her head who stared at me with empty eyes and suffered herself to be touched and poked and prodded. I was given to understand that in time I would be permitted to mount and ride, as if this were some great treat. At times she brought a dog instead, different breeds on different days, and pointed up their skills and purposes, what their requirements were, and the conformation of their bodies. The dogs had more spirit than the broken old mare, but they also seemed easily cowed.
So, too, other teachings changed. A great loom was delivered and set up overnight beneath the pomegranate tree, with a dyed canvas sheet for shelter from the rain. Mistress Leonie began to teach me the more commercial aspects of weaving. A whole pig carcass arrived, which Mistress Tirelle and I spent three days butchering so I could see where on the animal’s body each cut of meat came from. Some we cured; some we cooked. Much went to waste.
Whatever they truly meant to make of me, I became increasingly aware of the substantial investment of time and resources the Factor was lavishing on my education.
The best change in lessons came, as I might have hoped, from the Dancing Mistress. She arrived one evening after dinner, not her usual schedule. Mistress Tirelle’s habit at that time was to have me read or practice my calligraphy in the last hours. She would then retire early. Thus I was surprised to see any of my instructresses at such an hour—especially the silver-furred woman.
“Come outside, Girl,” the Dancing Mistress said to me from my doorway. Behind her, Mistress Tirelle made some grumbling huff at the bottom of her breath. Judging by the look that passed between them, this argument had already been waged and lost.
In the courtyard, the moon spilled careless light on the cobbles. The newest shoots on the twigs of the pomegranate tree were silver-dark, while the shadows seemed to breathe ink. We stood awhile under the cold stars, exchanging no words.
That, I was happy enough to do. Every moment of my life was ruled by a guided watchfulness. Sharing the airy silence with the only friend I had was a goodness.
“You climbed well,” the Dancing Mistress said. “This pleases me.”
I clasped my hands.
Her voice deepened with sadness. “You are free to speak while we are at this lesson.”
“Mistress, I enjoyed the climb.”
“Good. Would you do it again, by moonlight?”
“When the tree is dark?” How hard could it be to find my way up? I was still quite small then, and had little fear of fitting my body anywhere I was permitted to go in the first place.
“Your friend the moon will provide hints to your eyes, Girl.”
I wore nothing but a shift, under a rough woolen wrap I’d woven for myself. My hands and feet were bare.
Up I went. The memory of my prior climb was strong. The tree’s bark was knotted and twisted to welcome my fingers. The branches alternated, so I could reach them like the rungs of a ladder.
Climbing was a joy. This was as close as I’d come to freedom since first walking away from the sound of Endurance’s bell with Federo’s hand clasped firmly around my own. No wonder Mistress Tirelle had so violently disapproved of climbing. My spirit soared with the lifting of my body, and the ancient moon was my oldest friend.
If the tree were tall enough, towering over the whole city of Copper Downs, could I see all the way home to Papa’s fire and the whuffling breath of the ox?
The upper branches were light and thin. They swayed even beneath my then-small weight. I could see the roof of the Pomegranate Court, the copper sheaths that kept the rain off my head, gleaming back at the moon. The bluestone walls were topped with a wide, flat walkway that I could not see from the ground. A place for soldiers to tread upon their watch, I realized, thinking back on all the battle poetry Mistress Danae had read to me. At least, if this house were in need of soldiers. Rooftops poked beyond, hinting at the city I’d seen so briefly on arriving in the harbor, and had been hidden away from ever since.
I turned and looked the other way. The taller inner wall of our courtyard was more clearly seen as a tower. Other treetops were visible in the other courts I had glimpsed before. For a long, strange moment I wondered if other Girls had been set to climb this night,
if I would meet the eyes of my rival slaves over the rims of the walls set to keep us isolate and inviolate.
The Dancing Mistress had not asked me to move with speed, and so I did not return right away. Instead I looked down at the canvas that covered the loom, at the chest where the gear for the horses and dogs was kept, at the gatehouse marking the path to freedom.
Mine was a tiny, tiny world, but still far richer than the frog-filled ditches of Papa’s farm. I had no word for farm in my own language—where we lived was where we lived. I would not have learned to read, or anything of arithmetic, or the finer arts of cooking with all the poisons of the world, if I had stayed there.
I would not have been a slave if I had not come here.
“No one will own me,” I said in my own words.
The climb down was more difficult than the climb up had been. I picked my way with care and still slid twice, before falling the last ten feet and just barely missing the loom’s canvas. Still, I landed upright and kept my stance.
The Dancing Mistress stared at me, her eyes hooded by shadow. “What did you see up there?”
I opened my mouth, then stopped. She did not want a report on the copper roof of my house. What had I seen? I wondered. I blurted the deeper answer as it came to me, without further thought. “The path to freedom.”
“Hold that in your heart. I cannot release you from this place, but together we can visit freedom.”
I longed to ask her how, but the patience that had been beaten into me was a lesson well-learned.
“Now you will run about the courtyard as fast as you can go,” she said.
“For how long?”
“Until I tell you to stop, or your legs slip from beneath you.”
Eventually I went back inside with my shoulders aching and my mind racing.
I had trouble walking again the day after that first run, though I was pleased this time rather than humiliated. The pain had been earned. There was no cruelty. Just honest effort. The Dancing Mistress told Mistress Tirelle that I had bruised myself practicing cross-steps.