Green

by Jay Lake

  That all flowed through Federo, of course. Over time, it had become very clear to me that they were training me for some vigorous task. Not to bring about violence, I thought, for all the lessons in the night were about movement and defense and survival, but some other purpose, which entailed the risk of being a target. This was layered within the work of making me a great lady of the Stone Coast.

  Those lies were threadbare as well, though it might be fairer to call them avoidances. The Factor’s women could hardly spend every waking hour sharpening my mind, then expect me not to use all the logic and experience being poured into me.

  When things went well, I almost enjoyed myself. There is pleasure in painting, or reading a history, or making the numbers move to your command. Even today, I have not lost appreciation of those gifts.

  Still, the hard hand was close behind. Except in the matter of the Dancing Mistress, I was watched as carefully as any virgin princess in a children’s tale. None of these women owed me love, or even respect. None of them thought of me as anything but a difficult task representing a risk of terrible failure.

  Only the Dancing Mistress took me for who and what I was. Not what I had been—that was hidden to all but Federo, and he would never speak of it—but who the Girl was inside the forging they made of me.

  To be fair, Mistress Tirelle in her strange way saw the reality of who I was. Somehow the fact that she could know something of my inner self, and still treat me with cruel caprice, was all the more hurtful.

  I kept my imaginary belled silk under the invisible needle. My stories of the first days of life faded over time to mere images, though still sorted over in my mind as carefully as any box of prints brought to me by Mistress Danae or Mistress Ellera. The old words were there, but they seemed fewer and fewer with each passing season, slipping away in favor of the Petraean speech and all the knowledge that tongue brought flowing like a river through the days of my life.

  One day I could not remember my name. I had been “Girl” for so long, and I had not heard my name since the first seasons of my life. This may seem incredible, but by then I had been in the Pomegranate Court for more than six years. No one had ever addressed me as anything but Girl. My true name, the secret name of my birth, I had not even whispered to myself in the quiet hours when I remembered my oldest stories.

  Only the ox Endurance remained, his name as strong as he was. The other images from those first days—my grandmother and the bells of her funeral, the frogs in the ditches—they were strong, too. But both the words and names slipped away like sand beneath a tide.

  I cried that night, so hard, the sound slipped from my mouth until I overheard Mistress Tirelle stirring. She made such noise that I found a way to stop. After a while, I realized her groaning had been purposeful. She had spared me another beating to leave me to my tears.

  Was that a form of love?

  The question made me cry all over again, this time in shuddering silence.

  Over time, we began to meet people on the underground runs. Where the rooftop wanderers remained silent and separate as the distant stars, a different etiquette prevailed beneath the stones. When you crossed a path down Below, you paused a moment to let the other examine you.

  “This is how we mark foes,” the Dancing Mistress explained after one such passage. “Someone who does not pause is as good as raising a blade to you. The beasts and those lost to reason will not stop, and so you know them dangerous.”

  “What of friends?”

  “There are no friends beneath the stones.”

  “Not even us?”

  “That is for you to decide, Girl. I am who I am to you.”

  That remark I turned over in my head a long while.

  Some months thereafter, the Dancing Mistress began to speak at certain of these meetings. “Mother Iron,” she whispered one night.

  The other nodded. She was a short woman, only a silhouette to my view, though her eyes gleamed with the faintest reflection of the coldfire in my hand. She had a misshaping about her, though I could not say if it was clothing, armor, or a strangeness of her body.

  “This is my student,” the Dancing Mistress said.

  Mother Iron answered in words I did not understand. Her voice came from a deep place, as if she were much taller than she looked, with a chest the size of a horse—I had just then been studying more of the science of sounds and had acquired some sense of how they were made.

  The Dancing Mistress answered in the same words. They both nodded, and Mother Iron stepped around us. She did not smell right at all, more like the bottom of the horse box beneath the leather and metal of the bits than any person I had met.

  I knew better than to question there, but later I asked, “Who was that?”

  “Mother Iron.”

  We were crouched behind the pomegranate tree as I took off my blacks.

  “But what manner of person is she? What does she do there?”

  “She is her own, and pursues her own affairs.”

  A spirit then, or some small god perhaps. “You will not answer me in this.”

  “No, Girl.” The Dancing Mistress smiled in the moonlight. “But I will tell you this: Anyone you meet Below whose name I give you is not an enemy.”

  “No one is my friend.”

  “Yes. But should you find trouble, Mother Iron might attend. If it suits her. She is unlikely to further your woes with purpose.”

  “Thank you. I think.”

  “You are welcome,” she said gravely.

  There was one Below who was far more than a name heard once or twice a season. We first encountered him under the warmest night of the year, in the middle of the passage of the weak northern summer.

  The Dancing Mistress had me doing falls in the dark those months. She would bid me stand in someplace fairly safe, then slip away with my coldfire in her hand. A minute or two later, I would hear her click her tongue, one click for each yard-length of the drop. I needed to summon the courage to step forward, find the edge, and jump blind.

  The first time we tried that, with a fall of less than three feet, I was terrified. With practice, though it never became easy, the discipline grew reasonable. I learned how to trust a partner, and I learned how to fall in the dark.

  “You can already find walls by listening for echoes,” she told me. “We will work on you judging the depths the same way, once you know how to drop in safety.”

  A strange exercise, but I’d long since realized her greatest purpose lay in pushing me past my own limits, time after time.

  I stood on a balcony, a low rail a foot before me, though I knew that only from experience. The Dancing Mistress clicked four times. A fall of about twelve feet. That would require a forward tuck with a full roll, before I landed four points down. No need for the bone shock of striking on two feet when hands could ease the blow. The shoes and gloves spared my skin on these exercises, but I could twist a joint or jam a forearm or leg easily enough. My size would help avoid this, while I was still young.

  As I was bending for my leap, someone touched my shoulder. I yelped and dropped. The stone balustrade trapped me immediately. My attacker bent close.

  I caught him in a wide-handed slap. He backed away with a sharply indrawn breath. I could hear the soft noises of the Dancing Mistress hurrying to my aid. A moment later, the gleam of coldfire appeared.

  “Ho,” she said softly.

  “Unnh . . .” The stranger’s voice was muffled. I realized he had a hand on his face, and that he was in fact male. “You boke my node!”

  “This is the girl, Septio. Girl, this is Septio.”

  “Sir,” I said cautiously. My tongue was tied with a strange fear. I found my feet, but kept the drop behind me close in mind. If they came to blows, or even sharp argument, I’d go over into the twelve feet of darkness to be out of his reach and away from whatever violence this newcomer and my Dancing Mistress might commit together.

  “I didn’t bead to scare you.” His voice was still strang
e. I scented a new metal-salty tang. So that’s how it sounds when a man’s nose fills with blood, I thought.

  The Dancing Mistress chuckled. “Septio is a Keeper of the Ways.”

  I heard it as a title. Titles had been much discussed lately in the Pomegranate Court. I wanted to ask for whom, and of what ways, but I chose silence. In my experience, others often would fill it.

  “Do you know of the Ways, girl?” Septio asked, his voice clearing. I realized then from his tone that he was little older than I. A boy, down here in the dark alone.

  The Dancing Mistress touched my shoulder. “She is from across the Storm Sea. What she has been taught is extensive, but very . . . focused. The Ways are distant from the agenda of her keepers.”

  I had never heard so much said directly about the purpose of my time at the Pomegranate Court

  She squeezed my shoulder harder. “You may answer for yourself.”

  To speak to a stranger! “The sun is just as hot for every man,” I told him in my own words, my old words. By then that was one of the few things I could remember Papa saying. Then in Petraean: “I do not know, sir. The Ways are hidden from me.”

  “The Ways are hidden from most people.” He took his hand from his face and drew a deep, snuffling breath. “You have good reflexes.”

  He and the Dancing Mistress exchanged pleasantries; then Septio moved on into the quiet depths.

  “That was a priest,” I finally said.

  “They are not generally so young.”

  I awoke one day to the sound of voices. A crowd of women had gathered in the courtyard. They were placing chairs and sorting themselves into positions in the dawn light. I had never seen so many people at once in the Pomegranate Court—four at the most before this morning. If not for the Dancing Mistress’ night runs, I would not have seen more than four people at once in the years since Federo drove me here from Fortune’s Flight.

  Each one of the women wore a straight-backed gown in black satin, with ribbon cross-lacing bodices that were slashed to show gray silk beneath. A uniform of sorts, shared by the two dozen of them.

  I dressed myself as well as my unprepared wardrobe allowed, then stepped outside to find Mistress Tirelle and Mistress Maglia awaiting me. Mistress Maglia was clothed to match the women below, while Mistress Tirelle was swathed as always.

  “Come, Girl,” Mistress Maglia said. That was unnecessary. I could see what was wanted. Besides, it had been years since I’d let my rebellious nature overcome my curiosity.

  I followed the Mistress until she set me in a chair upon a small riser. That placed me high up overlooking the uniformed women. Instruments emerged from cases, carriers, and sacks. Polished brass gleamed in the morning sun. Mellow brown woods shone in the shape of a woman’s curves. Narrow silver pipes trilled as their warming-up began.

  What I had studied as harp and spinet and flute, one instrument at a time, was about to unfold before me in the array of a performance. I was entranced. My own skill with anything but voice was marginal at best. Mistress Maglia had given me only scraps and foretastes of this.

  Mistress Tirelle stood close, stretching to speak with me. “You know the tests of the fruit. This is the same, with music.”

  Mistress Maglia came to my other ear. “They will play pieces of music known to you. The first is the overture to Grandieve’s Trollhattan Moods. You will listen through. Then they will play again, but certain musicians will play flat or off-key or out of tempo from time to time. When you hear an error, you will point to the offender.”

  I clasped my hands. She nodded, a sharp smile on her dark-browed features. “When I am wrong, what will happen?”

  “Mistress Tirelle will record your marks as given by me, and show you punishment later.”

  I had not taken a beating in almost two weeks. It seemed improbable that I would finish the day without a score of blows due to me.

  When they played, the women made a beautiful sound, which twined around me. It must have been audible in the other courts as well. The Grandieve piece is a study of moods, a series of tone poems about an icy island in a high-walled northern bay. Mistress Ellera had once shown me a painting of Trollhattan. I could see the sound pictures even when I had first practiced it on my little flute.

  The orchestra made it as big as the sky.

  They played through perfectly, then fell silent. At direction from Mistress Maglia, they resumed. This time one of the horns was flat in the very first measure. I pointed, the woman nodded and set aside her instrument. Two bars later, a viol slipped out of key. I pointed again. Another nod, another instrument fell away.

  By the end, I had missed but three. Only four players still carried the composition.

  If not for the promised punishment, this would have been a fascinating exercise.

  So began my training with others. All women, still, but more and more came to the Pomegranate Court in the months that followed. We staged dinner parties where some women wore black sashes to indicate they would be served and eat as men. Women in leather trousers marched in review as if they were a squad of guards. Women in pairs danced alongside me in the practice room or out in the court while a small orchestra played.

  I was learning to be in the world. Somehow this was stranger and more frightening than being below the stones, because this was the truth of what they pushed me toward.

  Every night I took my belled silk from its imaginary hiding place and added to it. These days, the bells were a cascade of tones and keys, different sounds that would have been a waterfall of music had such a thing ever existed in truth.

  I loved it, for all that it was pure figment.

  We found Septio again and again underground. Our paths crossed often enough that I soon realized it was not coincidence. He, like Federo, played a role in the silent conspiracy that wrapped my life with an invisible thread.

  I did not strike him again, and Septio did not remind me of my first attack. Instead we took time to talk on occasion.

  “The gods of Copper Downs are silent,” he told me. “They are real as the gods of any other country. I could show you their beds and bodies, except that their power would strike you blind.”

  “It’s not merely silence if one has been reduced to bones.”

  “Gods are different.”

  Later, the Dancing Mistress and I spoke quietly while taking turns climbing an ornate wall and dropping free.

  “His god’s name is Blackblood,” she told me.

  “Not someone you should want to invoke, I think.”

  “I do not know. Septio has common cause with others who disagree with the Duke of Copper Downs. Common cause does not mean common interests. My folk are not usually of significance to the gods of men, nor they to us.”

  There was small purpose in asking the Dancing Mistress of her gods. She said so little of her people that I did not even know their name for themselves. Any more than I knew hers. I understood, though, that they were quite concerned with paths and souls and some connection that ran between them one and all.

  “I am human,” I said quietly.

  “You are not of this place. Your home has its own gods and spirits. They should be of importance to you.”

  “Tulpas,” I said, the word leaping to memory. “Like the soul of a place, or of an action. An idea, I suppose.”

  “The tulpas concern you. This city belongs to Blackblood and his fellow sleepers.”

  “I am of this city now.” That was a hateful thought, but true. “I can scarcely converse in the tongue of my birth, while in Petraean, I can speak learnedly on dozens of topics. The music of my people is unfamiliar to me, but I know what instruments they play here. Likewise the food, the clothing, the animals, the weapons. My roots may be in the fire-hot south, but Copper Downs has been grafted over me.”

  “Perhaps,” she said after a little thought. “They have dozens of gods here in this city. Blackblood is only one. Each has their concerns, their purposes, their temples and priests.”

&nbs
p; “It is like a market, then. Each stallholder calls his wares, and people pray where the fruit is freshest.”

  There was something sad in the Dancing Mistress’ voice as her slow reply came. “You may have the right of it, but you miss the deeper truth. Gods are real, just like people. Petty, noble; vicious, kind; strong, weak. But you do not buy one for an afternoon and then throw her away. Each god means something to this city. They are always of something, called at need, staying until after all have forgotten them.” She sighed heavily. “So long as it is not I who calls them.”

  Federo came time and again. He would sample my cooking, examine my needlework, or watch me dance. We would talk, but I always held my tongue from the words that counted. Mistress Tirelle lurked in doorways to overhear what we spoke of. If I expressed myself too frankly, or was too bitter, there would be a beating later.

  Where I wish now that I had found a different way in those years was that Federo and I never spoke in my words. We never used that language for which I then had no name. He knew some of the words, to be sure, for we had spoken thus when he first bought me away from Papa.

  Mistress Tirelle treated the words as if they were an infection. Federo was no different.

  My stories had slipped further and further away in the nights when I lay abed and thought on my earliest memories. What always lay close to mind was Endurance, and the sound of bells.

  ______

  I never did see the other candidates, but just as Mistress Tirelle had me working amid larger groups of people and showing more of my accomplishments, so the competitions increased. Hardly a month went by that the Factor did not send for something of skill and purpose from his girls. Calligraphy, in the classic style brought from the lands of the Sunward Sea. A dance designed by me and taught to a servant who would deliver it to him, set to the same piece of music used by others. A hound to be trained at a certain trick in two weeks’ time.

  The outcomes of the competitions were not reported back to me. I could on occasion gauge by Mistress Tirelle’s mood when news had come, but precisely what news, I had to guess.