Green

by Jay Lake

  Blades. That was an interesting term. Despite the slow leaching of my pain and fatigue by the bath, my mind was engaged. “What did you say your name was?” I asked reluctantly. I could hardly call her “girl.”

  “Samma,” she answered in a small voice.

  “That’s a nice name.”

  “No, it’s not.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “You are from far away. It’s what they call dogs here, mostly.”

  “What should I call you instead?”

  “It’s my name,” Samma said unhappily.

  “Names can change. Trust me.” I’d killed for mine, after all.

  “You’re a strange one, Green.”

  I leaned forward from the rolled edge of the tub. “As may be. My arms hurt. Can you help me with my hair?”

  Her touch on my head, the brush of her chest against my back, was like balm for a pain I hadn’t known I’d been feeling. Were ordinary children raised in their parents’ arms? When Samma began to trace her fingers on my neck and shoulders, I shivered so hard, I nearly passed out.

  In time we went to see Mother Vajpai, properly attired. My pigsticker was wrapped in a bath towel so it would not be presented as a weapon on our arrival.

  ______

  She turned out to be the woman I had met briefly on my arrival here at the Temple of the Silver Lily. Today she stood dressed in red silks and chenilles chased with silver threads. Her hair was drawn up in a tight net of rubies, and her eyes rimmed with a powder the same color.

  “Mother Vajpai,” I said, bowing my head.

  Samma touched me once on the shoulder, for luck perhaps, then retreated. She closed the curved double doors through which she had just led me.

  This room was taller than it was wide, like the temple itself, with a triangular floor. The point was behind the woman. It held no furniture except carpets and cushions on the floor.

  “You are Green,” Mother Vajpai said. “Mother Meiko spoke highly of you. She does not often do so.”

  “We met on the road. I walked beside her for a while. We did not talk.”

  Mother Vajpai steepled her hands and nodded. “Mother Meiko listens very, very well. Especially to silence.”

  I realized ruefully how true that must be. “Yes.”

  “You are a stranger here.”

  That hadn’t been a question, and so required no answer.

  “You were raised across the sea,” she said after a smooth moment. “Stone Coast. Houghharrow? Or perhaps Copper Downs?”

  “Copper Downs, Mother.”

  “Someone there has spent a great deal of effort to make you into something.” She walked around behind me. “We do not make women into something here in Kalimpura. Sometimes, rarely, a woman makes herself.” Mother Vajpai passed in front of me again.

  Her review was an echo of the Factor’s inspection. My anger rose fast. “I am no one’s tool. I will be the sword in no one’s hand.”

  “All people are held in someone else’s hand.” She bent close to meet me eye to eye. “It is the way of Creation. The secret is to choose whose fingers are tangled in your hair.”

  “Whose are tangled in your hair, Mother?” I asked in my nastiest voice.

  Her smile dawned like a sun made of silver-rimmed ivory. I had never seen such teeth, and was caught for a moment in their strangeness. “I serve the Lily Goddess, my little Green. No man wields me. No ruler calls my step. No council reins me in.”

  “No.” I could see this trap easily enough. “Your Goddess wraps her hand around your heart. Whoever she is.”

  “You are of Copper Downs, my girl. Their gods have been silent far too long. The people of that city follow their own ways with a recklessness that will someday be accounted for. You are not understanding what a goddess is.”

  “A goddess is a tulpa grown large.”

  Still bent to face me, she shook her head in dismissal. “Tulpas. Country superstition. Little spirits who are being worshipped by ignorant farmers and disingenuous monks.”

  I had thought them more like larval gods. Or very ancient ones worn to nothing. Fragments, like in the oldest stories.

  Mother Vajpai continued. “No, Green. A goddess is the sum of all her believers, all the prayers and hopes and curses and despair ever uttered in her name. Our Goddess spans the lives of women, from the darkest night of a girl raped and left for dead in a waterfront alley to the silver-bright wedding day of the highest princess in the land. The hand of the Lily Goddess upon my heart is my own hand, multiplied a thousandfold. We serve Her as She serves us. We are Her, and She is us.”

  I knew that for as great a load of claptrap as any myth out of Mistress Danae’s books. Gods were real, surely enough. Septio’s silent Blackblood back in Copper Downs had been real. The various theogenies and dieophanies I’d read of during my years under tutelage had made it quite clear that gods were bullies, children, pettifoggers, and taskmasters different only from the worst of men in the degree of the power they held.

  The depths of my youthful hubris were staggering.

  “As may be, Mother,” I said politely.

  She stretched to her full height once more. “Of course, you are not believing me. How could you? You come to us from a country of apostates. There is nowhere here in Kalimpura for you. I know of your troubles outside the gates. You—”

  “You do not know my troubles, Mother,” I interrupted. “You have not the least notion of them.”

  She shook her head. “A girl of your age has not killed without great provocation. Where will you go, with that habit of anger in your heart and the killing already in your hands?”

  That much of my troubles she did understand. “I will find a way,” I said, surly and restless now. I was ready to be quit of her.

  “There is a way here for you.”

  “For a killer orphan?” I snapped. “For a lost girl with murder in her eye who knows too much about nothing, and not enough about anything?”

  “For a girl who can keep her balance, and knows her way around a knife, yes. I’d wager much that you have other talents as well.”

  “I can prepare a banquet, sew clothes fit for a Duke’s court, and play nine different instruments,” I said, almost snarling.

  “No doubt is harbored in my mind,” Mother Vajpai replied sweetly. “We have an order of guardians here in this temple. The Blades stand behind the younger daughters and widows who serve the Lily Goddess. They wield the Goddess’ will to the very hilt if needed. Their way can be yours.”

  A test? A fraud? Did it matter? “What you offer me is a joining to your temple’s Blades. Shelter and fellowship in exchange for my skills.”

  “Yes.” Her mouth wrinkled in a sad expression. “Your skills. There are never enough girls in a generation for what the temple needs. Not at the altar, not in the healing wards, not among the justiciars. Most especially not among the Blades of the Lily.”

  “To kill once is hard,” I said, recalling Mother Meiko’s words. “To kill twice is easier. To kill three times is a habit. Most of your girls never take the hard road, do they?”

  “No.” She sighed. “It is the Blades who oversee the Death Right.”

  A thought occurred to me. “Who oversees the Blades?”

  “Why, my dear . . .” Mother Vajpai smiled. “I do.” With those words, she spun into a snap kick that blended into a whirling slash of the edge of her hand.

  I had walked for a month, and sailed a month prior to that, but the years before were filled with the Dancing Mistress’ lessons. They were in nowise lost on me. I slid beneath her kick and ducked away from the blow before throwing myself toward her balance leg.

  Never kick unless you have no other choice, the Dancing Mistress had said. You are too easily downed with any of your feet off the floor.

  Mother Vajpai had shown off. The hilt of my tight-wrapped knife struck the side of her knee even as I threw my weight against her ankle.

  She went down hard, tangling in her red silks, but somehow her fingers caught
me on the ear. We wound up rolling to a stop against some cushions on the floor. A slim blade poked into my throat, while the fingers of Mother Vajpai’s other hand were clawing painfully in my ear.

  “Very good,” she whispered. My ear burned with the cut of her nails. The knife at my neck stung. “A new girl has never taken me down at the first lesson. But then you are not really being a new girl, are you?”

  “It’s very nearly a habit.”

  “Then you can learn so much more. We are done.” She released me. “Are you with us?”

  “I have nowhere to go,” I said flatly as I rolled away from her.

  “Now you do.” Mother Vajpai rose to her feet in a fluid motion I did not know how to duplicate, though I could see her knee troubled her. “You are one of us.”

  I would be no tool. “Am I sworn?”

  “Not yet. And not for some time to come. Go with Samma. She waits outside. She will show you the dormitories and introduce you to the teaching Mothers.”

  Straightening my pale robe, I said, “I will be under no one’s lash, not ever again.”

  “Go, Green. All will be well.”

  For a while, all was well. I quartered with the Aspirants of the Blades of the Lily. Samma was my bedmate and dining partner and, more to the point, the one who guided me through the training exercises, through the winding halls of the Silver Temple, through the endless services filled with chanting homage to the Lily Goddess.

  This was a reflection of the Pomegranate Court and the Factor’s house, except here was light to those shadows. Where Mistress Tirelle had kept me close within walls and isolated, the teaching Mothers herded their aspirants in a clotted little crowd, the nine of us who were currently passing through the Petals.

  Other aspirants trained for the other orders of the Lily Goddess. I soon learned that the Temple took in girls from the great families and trading houses of Kalimpura and the rest of Selistan. Each renounced her social responsibilities and any direct access to her wealth to dedicate her life to the Goddess. In return, the girls were sheltered in powerful luxury and permitted to take up traditionally male arts such as healing and law.

  Those girls were of the high and mighty, and they certainly knew it. The healing and justiciary aspirants were paraded about at services and on feast days, sometimes brought before the courts of the city—unlike Copper Downs, Kalimpura had managed to settle on and maintain a reasonable succession of rulership, even if the system was difficult for outsiders to comprehend.

  The Blades were another sort altogether. One girl of our nine, Jappa, had come from a trading house, training with the justiciary aspirants awhile before joining the Blades as an older-than-normal Second Petal. Otherwise our girls were street rats and foundlings and natural children of unmarried daughters.

  And one foreigner, of course.

  Me.

  My skin might be Selistani, but my scarred face was not. A small child with my looks would have been drowned. An older girl would have been cast out for a beggar. Even more so, my speech was not Selistani. Most of all, what I had in my head was very much not of this place.

  My fellow aspirants quickly came to prize some of that foreign knowledge. Guttersnipes were not so educated in cookery, but they certainly appreciated food. While some among the women made it their business to be in the temple kitchens at all hours of the day, my special talents in that area were quite different.

  We had lessons of every sort. My experiences were truckled out of me in those sessions. We also trained with the Lily Blades themselves; they frequently took us out into the city with them.

  Some of those excursions were runs, much as I had done by night with the Dancing Mistress back in Copper Downs. The rooftops of Kalimpura were not so useful as in my old city, but the Below was, if anything, more elaborate. The undercity was inhabited by entire gray-capped castes of people who came to the surface only at night. Armories and cisterns and granaries and dungeons and smithies and a whole life could be found in Kalimpura’s Below.

  This was a kind of heaven to me. I knew how to move underground. My falls and drops and dead reckoning were as good as Mother Shaila’s, who led many of the underground training runs, and better than most of the other Blades. She quickly had me drilling the aspirants. I became caught up in reconstructing the lessons once taught me by the Dancing Mistress. How had she led me to my knowledge, what steps had she taken me through to the understanding?

  That in turn kept me awake at nights and during our rare free hours, working on paper and slow-stepping through exercises with Samma.

  During those months, I also took up my belled silk once more. I had neglected it on the road from Bhopura, lost in my despair, but I had never completely abandoned the thing. I could remake the count of days once more—how often had I lost it before? The other girls mocked me awhile, but eventually they grew accustomed to the momentary sound of tiny bells ringing as I sewed a little while in some late hour of the evening.

  As I attached my bells, I thought about children. Federo had stolen me for a special purpose. Not stolen, really. Papa had been paid for me, after all. Here in Kalimpura, there were children on every street. They carried burdens and sold fruit and raced with messages strapped to their forearms and cringed in the backs of carts. How many of them were free? How many of them were with their mothers and fathers?

  I could not forget the promises made to myself back in Copper Downs. Would I somehow save all these children? Could I help any of them? How would I find and best a rich man surrounded by blades and bars?

  When I was able to set those thoughts aside, the hardest part of my new life was fitting me into the Blade training. Other than the underground, where I excelled, I had missed much that they expected of someone my age.

  “Now try to be stepping below my attack,” said Mother Vajpai. Today she wore a simple robe like everyone else, though the waist was cinched and the skirt tied off into legs. We were in one of the lower courts beneath the temple, where the Lily Blades had their passages of arms. When the women of the order were not using it, aspirants were free to collect bruises as we and our training Mothers saw fit.

  Mother Vajpai had taken a special interest in me.

  Samma, Jappa, and three others of our nine were in the lower court that day. Lanterns hissed with the sewer gas that drove their flames, shedding bright, almost shadowless light across the width of the damp stone room. Straw covered the floor. The edges were lined with rolled bolsters of muslin padded with cotton batting.

  I edged around Mother Vajpai. Here we had rules. “Only those steps and movements and blows that are permitted in the circle,” she’d told me.

  “When will we fight without rules?” I’d asked Samma later. She laughed and told me that was the last Petal, before we flowered into full Lily Blades.

  So we had rules, until we didn’t. Much like my time in Pomegranate Court. Nine years with rules, and a last few moments without. This was a way I could live.

  I backed away from her, letting my eyes follow her feet. Stance was everything, I’d been taught, starting the night that the Dancing Mistress had thrown me down to the stone.

  When Mother Vajpai struck, I almost missed it. Her stance had not changed at all. Only the posture of her upper body. She swung that flattened right hand. In the stretching moments of the coming blow, it looked like a sword blade to me. I slipped on purpose, sacrificing balance in order to drop out of the line of the blow. I knew I could roll away to recover before her next swing. It would not be a tactic I could use forever, but at the size of my middle youth, it should have worked.

  It might have worked, against the other training Mothers or the working Blades. It would have worked against the other aspirants, only because they were all slower than I. Against Mother Vajpai, who had seen me do this before, it only caught me a handstrike from her left, which swung in just out of my line of sight to slap me in the right temple.

  I collapsed in a welter of redness and pain. Even breathing seemed beyond me fo
r a time. When I caught up to myself, Mother Vajpai was speaking. “. . . from the center. Always to be following the eyes of your opponent. There are very, very few who can strike where they do not look.” She glanced down at me, smiling so that the silver edges of her teeth gleamed in the lamplight. “Can any of you take that blow as Green has?”

  I heard a shuffling of feet, but no one spoke.

  Mother Vajpai reached down for my hand and helped me up. “We do not train so much to forms,” she told me in a conversational voice, as if it were up to the others to overhear. “When one fights in a form, one expects one’s opponent to do so. Most whom you will meet with bared blade and bloody eye are not so obliging.”

  “Thank you, Mother.” I struggled not to stutter as my head rang.

  Her voice pitched up again, teaching-loud once more. “Green is being here less than two moons, yet she is better than any of you at defense. She can step out of almost any blow save the very trickiest, as I was just delivering. She can fall and come up again before her attacker has recovered their swing. I am wanting you to watch how she centers her body. I am wanting you to watch how she watches me. Once she learns to read my eyes properly, even I shall be having a struggle to land a blow upon her.”

  She reached over and brushed her fingers across my face before wagging her index finger in front of me. “Your eyes are being good,” she said. “Shall you be attacking me now?”

  “Yes, please.” I’d only ever touched her once, that first day. Mother Vajpai had limped slightly for almost a week. This was a quiet point of pride for me. Now, the only time we’d sparred since then, I might as well have been fighting the warm air from a bread oven for all I could touch her.

  Our usual fight trainer was Mother Anai. She had been working with me on attacks, and I’d touched her three times already. I was getting better, and I thought I was ready to try Mother Vajpai again.

  A feint was pointless. She was far more experienced. Likewise her reach of arm beat mine by a good margin. If I were fighting for my life, without the rules of the room, I might have gone for her face. As it was, I bowed, spun left, locked my eyes on her right side, then dove out of my own line of vision toward her left leg.