Green

by Jay Lake

  Oddly, I found myself blushing. “No, no. I want to go outside the temple.”

  “Our Goddess’ house is full of doors.” She yawned. “No woman is trapped here, least of all you who walk the streets every day.”

  “Without people knowing it’s me.”

  She cocked one eye open. “People here, or people out there?”

  “People out there, Mother. I don’t suppose anyone’s business is private inside the temple.”

  Mother Argai laughed. “Take two hundred and more of the most ornery, independent women in this city and put them under one roof? With the Goddess in charge, lurking in every corner like a fart in the Courts? No one’s business will ever be private. One grows accustomed.”

  Her casual words surprised me. Women in the Lily Temple tended to be comfortable with their divine patron, but I rarely heard someone speak so crudely of the Lily Goddess.

  “As may be, Mother. Still, I would pass the dockside unnoticed to hear news of the world.”

  “Missing your other home, eh?” She slopped through the water to draw me into a wet hug. “Then don’t go as a Blade, or as Green. Go as someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Put on a veil. Or mask, girl. You are your face to everyone who sees you. Most notice nothing else about you. Hide your face, you’ve hidden yourself.”

  I curled closer into her arms, my fingers seeking that spot on her hip. “I shall think on it.”

  Some time had passed since I had sewn more than my bells. I found the workshops on the ground floor of the temple, where I begged supplies for what I had in mind. The Mothers there were willing to give me black-dyed muslin, a bit of leather, and the appropriate needles and thread. “Ain’t nobody ever taking a liking to our work,” a white-haired woman told me. “If you are not being at the altar or the justiciary, you are being unseen hereabouts.”

  “My interest in cloth and clothing has been with me most of my life, Mother,” I said politely. “I wish to take it up again as I approach my vows.”

  “Such a sweet girl. Come see me at the end of my day. I’ll find something special to wrap you in.”

  “Of course, Mother.”

  Up in the dormitory, I began sewing pants and a tunic, with a cape and mask to go with it. I based them on my recollection of an illustration of the Carmine Flaxweed from one of Mistress Danae’s storybooks. He was the youngest son of a noble house that had been overthrown in Houghharrow, and had fought in secret to restore the fortunes of his brothers and his lover. I figured the look of a theatrical Stone Coast would-be assassin might pass well enough in this city of endless festival and spectacle.

  While I made no great secret of my project, I found I preferred to work on it alone. It took me several weeks. When I was done, I had flared leggings, a cinched tunic with long sleeves puffed at the wrist, a leather half mask, and a tatted veil. I was forced to buy a hat—making such a thing was not among my skills. Brims were not popular in Kalimpura, so that was round with a pointed leather crown.

  People would see only the gleam of my eyes. All else was dark and dramatic. Exactly the sort of outfit no working troublemaker would be caught dead in. I was trying for a naïve but possibly dangerous dilettante. If I could not be anonymous, I would be memorable for something other than who I really was.

  Taking a small sack of paisas with me, I went down to the Avenue of Ships late one afternoon dressed in my handmade blacks. I’d received a few stares leaving the Temple of the Silver Lily. The little space that followed the Mothers of the temple through the crowds of Kalimpura didn’t attach to this costume. Rough customers stayed away from me regardless. I saw pickpockets turn aside, as well as a pair of footpads. Perhaps it was the set of my shoulders.

  Along the Avenue of Ships, I drew no stares at all. Enough strange costumes came off the ships in harbor that I fit in as just another oddity. I walked the length of the street as the sun was setting. No one bothered me.

  I stepped into a tavern when dark fell. The signboard was at a slight angle, one chain slipping down. It read FALLEN AXE, with a crude painting of a black hood with two eyeholes. Somehow, that drew me.

  Within was a wide room with a low ceiling supported by rough-hewn tree trunks. Tables encircled each trunk. A trough of water stood against the far wall, chunks of ice floating in it.

  Sailors in the dress of half a dozen nations clustered at those tables. Few enough Selistani were here, which suited me fine.

  The barkeeper, a local man with no hair, nodded.

  I wondered what to do next.

  Money. Money. I had never really bought anything. I slipped half a dozen coppers onto the bar.

  He nodded again, then laid out a bowl and poured something dark and foamy from a jug.

  I sniffed it. Bitter, almost loamy, mixed with yeast. Ale? There had been wines back in the Pomegranate Court, and also at the table in the Lily Temple. Little Kareen had preferred a beer that smelled of swamp water, back when I’d worked for him outside the gates. I’d never tasted it myself.

  Taking my bowl, I retreated to an empty table and listened. Sailors chattered in several languages I did not speak, though one table muttered along in thickly accented Petraean.

  That was sufficient. I listened awhile longer to sounds that felt oddly like home to me, and drank from the edges of the thick unpleasant brew. I knew I looked like something from a festival dumb show. No one here cared, as half of them were equally out of place.

  Eventually I headed back to the temple, smiling beneath my mask.

  “Green.” Mother Vajpai stood at the door of the practice room where I fired arrows as fast as I could into a mudball target.

  I turned with an arrow nocked.

  She ignored the weapon to step toward me. “How are you, my girl?”

  We hadn’t spoken much in the past few weeks. “Well enough, Mother.”

  “You are growing closer to the need to take your vows.” She reached down and pushed the bow away, her fingers on the arrow shaft just behind the razored head.

  I slipped the arrow loose and let the bowstring relax. “Yes, Mother.” I was growing ever further from any desire to take my vows. The Goddess had not spoken to me since Curry’s death. My quarrels with the older Blades were weakening the bond of sisterhood.

  “We have let you be too long idle. Your . . . obsession . . . with costuming is unseemly.”

  In her present mood, my temper would do me no good at all. “I would walk the city unnoticed, Mother. With my face, I cannot simply pull on some bright sari and pretend to be a merchant’s daughter. A costume draws attention to something I am not.” I smiled. “Mother Argai first gave me the idea.”

  “I have spoken to Mother Argai concerning the wisdom of her suggestions.” She sighed. “You need to work more. Play less.”

  I gestured with the bow. “I work all the time.”

  Her voice was gentle. “To what end, Green? We serve the Goddess here. You have not recovered your sense of purpose since reaching your final Petal.”

  “To whatever end seems best to me. The Goddess moves us all, you say. Perhaps She moves me in a direction you cannot see.”

  “As may be.” Mother Vajpai’s tone was bare steel. “For now, you run with the Blades. I’m assigning you to Mother Shesturi. Her handle patrols the city six days a week, on whatever schedule she chooses to set.”

  A handle, of course, was a group of Blades.

  “I am not yet sworn.”

  “You will be soon.”

  We shall see, I thought. “What of my dockside forays?”

  Long silence. Finally she said, “I will not forbid you those. The Lily Goddess does not hold Her followers prisoner within these walls.”

  The implied yet hung between us like a slow curse.

  The women of Mother Shesturi’s handle were a mixed lot. All Blades stood outside the norms of the Temple of the Silver Lily, let alone the standards of the women of Kalimpura. I quickly realized that Mother Shesturi had the running of me
because her team were the misfits among the misfits.

  We gathered in one of the running rooms that let out onto the back of the temple, where the building faced an alley. There were three of these, long and narrow with benches along each side, and rows of racks and hooks. Today the rooms were empty, though I knew from my training they were used to store weapons or equipment for the Blades as needed.

  Mother Shesturi herself was a quiet woman. She was compact with an efficient way of moving, which told me I’d likely have trouble taking her down in the practice rooms. She patrolled the city with four other women in her handle.

  One was, to my surprise, Mother Argai. The other three I knew, but not particularly well: Mother Adhiti, Mother Gita, and Mother Shig. Mother Adhiti was by far the largest woman in the Blades, and one of the biggest human beings I had ever met. She was mostly muscle. Whipcord-thin Mother Gita rarely spoke. A pink scar seamed her face, giving me a sense of kinship which I immediately recognized as false. Mother Shig was harder to understand. She was small, her complexion almost gray, and she bordered on the misshapen. Even so, she climbed better than I—one of the few in the Temple who could.

  Mother Shesturi only nodded and said, “Welcome.” The others muttered, except for Mother Gita, who stared a long moment and then seemed to forget me.

  Blades on patrol dressed to be noticed. We wore light armored skirts over leather trousers, blouses of a triple-woven fabric slick to the touch, and knee-high boots. Everything was black. We didn’t strut abroad like members of the Street Guild working protection, or the Claviger Caste searching for criminals escaped from bond. Our patrols were in alleys, through potshops, down into the Below, and back up again.

  At first, I didn’t know what we were looking for. I followed Mother Shesturi and her handle high and low through Kalimpura. I already knew how people on the street made way for the Mothers of the Temple. Now I understood why.

  A Blade handle on the move was frightening even to me, and I knew these women.

  We returned home that first evening with not a dozen words exchanged. We touched no one, caused no fights, ended no fights. We had simply been present, at different times and places all over Kalimpura.

  “Target practice in the shooting hall a span before sunrise,” Mother Shesturi announced as we sat in the running room to change into our Temple robes.

  That night I had little time to do anything but sleep. I didn’t touch up my costume, or consider venturing out.

  The next morning we shot early with bows and crossbows. Mother Shesturi worked us until we had each achieved a tight group with both weapons on all three ranges.

  “Run at noon,” she said when we finished up. Time for a bath, then we were on the street again.

  So it went for a week straight. The other women of the handle began grumbling, except Mother Gita, who continued to keep her own counsel. After several days, Mother Adhiti looked me over closely. “Surely you are being old enough to mind yourself. How dangerous are you?”

  One night we ran to a dozen small havens. Mother Vishtha had told me of them—lean-tos and sheds and hollows, and occasionally entire apartments or offices, scattered across Kalimpura for Blades to seek out if they met with trouble. Our handle checked them from a distance, then sent someone sidling close to certain ones. Being small and swift, that usually was me.

  “It is death, you know,” said Mother Argai as I shimmied down a drainpipe from checking a rooftop.

  “What?”

  “We tell no one. Not even the rest of the Temple. The Blades have very few rules, but one is that we never tell of the small havens except to other Blades.” She leaned so close she could have kissed my ear. “That rule may save your life someday, Green.”

  The eighth day we ran, this time well into the evening, was the first time I’d seen a handle meet with trouble. Mother Shesturi brought us up out of the Below behind the Plaza of Broken Swords, right where I’d come up after killing Michael Curry. We came to ground in front of the mango grove I remembered all too well. A group of men squatted beneath the trees with bare steel in hand.

  Twelve men, I counted quickly, and noted the best three swordsmen by their stance. Six of us. I was too short-armed to face any of these in a stand-up fight. I wasn’t sure about Mother Shig, either.

  Mother Shesturi made the same assessment. She barked our names in order, pointing as she spoke. I was on the right edge of the group, with Mother Shig. I carried only my pigsticker, though the sworn Blades all bore swords.

  “Go away home, boys,” Mother Shesturi told them. “Your beds are getting cold.”

  The leader held his sword loosely at his side. “The soldier women of Kalimpura.” His Seliu was terribly accented, though the words were right. “I wondered if you were real.” He called out to his men in some language I did not recognize.

  Their blades came up.

  Mother Shesturi nodded. “No one walks away.” She meant no rules. Faces, joints, necks, hearts, guts. However the enemy presented himself to you. Whatever you needed to drive him down.

  Mother Adhiti waded in first. Three of them fell back to draw her on. She kept moving past the springpoint of their trap. Then I lost sight of the others because Mother Shig and I were closed on by two grinning men. They laughed to one another as they came for an easy kill.

  Mother Shig sprang into the air, legs splayed wide, and brought her sword down above the guard of one of the attackers to split his face open. He fell screaming as she hopped onto his chest, her heels drumming into his ribs.

  His partner turned with a snarl. I slipped the pigsticker in below that crest of bone that rides at the waist, in front of the hips. His armored berk ended a little too high for its intended purpose. The man shrieked and tried to swing back to me, but my blade grated against his hip. I slugged him right next to the embedded blade, then kicked him in the back of the knee. The fighter went down in time to receive Mother Shig’s sword point inches deep into his ear. He kicked twice, then died noisily.

  I pulled free my bandit blade and went for the back of another man engaged with Mother Argai. He never saw me coming. I took him with an upthrust to the kidneys—they obviously did not think to be fighting people as short as I still was then. Mother Argai used the momentary respite to slash the throat out of her second attacker. Her third caught her in the shoulder, a rage-filled blow that tore through the black shirt and opened her to the bone.

  She collapsed with clenched teeth sucking in a shriek. I stepped close inside her attacker’s swing and took his wrist on my own shoulder. His sword flailed as he punched with his free hand. The knife that I hadn’t seen snagged on the left sleeve of my shirt. I smacked my head hard into his chest, then smacked him there again, trusting Mother Shig to arrive.

  Arrive she did, announcing herself by shattering the man’s sword arm. He fell screaming next to Mother Argai, who put her dagger in the soft underpart of his jaw with her off hand.

  Then it was over. I couldn’t have counted to twenty through the entire length of the fight. Eight men were dead, one more dying with a wet, wounded bubbling squeak. Three would continue to breathe so long as Mother Shesturi was moved to allow them.

  Mother Argai was down with the slashed shoulder, bleeding very badly. Two of Mother Gita’s fingers hung by a flap of skin. She silently pushed them more or less into place, then wrapped tight a strip of cloth.

  I tore a cloak from one of the dead men and began to bind Mother Argai’s shoulder. Mother Shig sprinted away at a word from Mother Shesturi.

  In this city, even the cutpurses would stop to aid a fallen Blade. Unless she was alone and there was no chance of being caught. Now that the fighting was done, people were drifting into the park. Mother Shesturi deputized half a dozen good-sized men to stand on the necks of the survivors.

  Then I realized I was hurt, too. Blood was spattered all down my left sleeve. That side was growing numb.

  Mother Gita squatted down next to me and touched the wound on my upper arm with the finger
s of her good hand. I nearly passed out from the pain. “Good work,” she said, then began packing dirt into my wound.

  Dirt? I thought.

  The world whirled in darkness.

  “We run as we do so no one will know where to find us,” said Mother Shesturi to me three days later.

  “That hardly seems effective,” I mumbled.

  “If we are nowhere, we are everywhere. You, Green, were everywhere that night.”

  “Wh-who were they?”

  “The men we killed?” Her smile was grim. “No one. Nothing. Men bent on stealing something that didn’t belong to them. We found them on accident.”

  “Th-then why do we care?”

  Mother Shesturi took my hand. “What happens to Kalimpura happens to the Lily Goddess. When the city suffers, She suffers. When we defend everyone, we defend ourselves.”

  “We killed a dozen men in the park.” My stomach flipped.

  “So we did.” Her tone was even.

  The wounded had not survived. Should I sorrow? “Please,” I said. “I would like a dozen black candles, and a dozen white candles. Matches. And if you know, their names.”

  “This is not our way.”

  “It is my way,” I insisted, feeling my temper bubble.

  Eventually she said, “Fair enough.”

  I waited for my candles and considered the nature of souls. The air circled in the healing room as if the Goddess had something to say. I glared at Her, wherever She was. “I will be going down to the docks. I wish to hear more of Copper Downs. If they are still buying children, I will know of it.”

  No answer came but silence.

  ______

  It took ten aching days for the slash through my left biceps to heal well enough that I could pull weight with that arm again. The candles had brought me neither peace nor release, but still I felt better for them. I sat in on training with the younger Blade aspirants. The kitchens took more of my time, as I dictated recipes and tasted new experiments in their version of northern cooking. “Bland,” Mother Cook said of a lamb stew, “but we can build on it.” They still liked my baking best.