In the Garden of Iden (8 page)

Actually it took him a month, and Joseph was obliged to throw a tantrum about it first. I needed the time to adapt, though, I really did.

It was fortunate I was portraying a shy girl from a convent, because I hid upstairs the first day while our mortal servants came in to work. I could smell them through the floorboards. They were actually in the same building with us, in reach of fire and sharp objects and, and, and … Nefer finally hitched up her skirts and stomped upstairs after me, muttering under her breath.

“Will you come down, for hell’s sake!” She swung open my door. “It’s only the damn laundress and groom, anyway.”

“He has an abscessed tooth, and it could start hurting at any time and send him into a killing frenzy,” I informed her, looking up from my work. “And the female’s in a highly volatile emotional state. Possibly premenstrual. She’s also sustained several contusions and is in pain, which could prompt a psychotic episode.”

“Her husband beat her up last night, that’s all.” Nefer came into the room. “Believe me, she’s used to pain. Does her work just fine anyway.”

“She might suddenly snap.”

“And do what? Chase us around with wet laundry? Mendoza, I know this is your first time out, but you can’t let the monkeys get to you this way. They’re just mortals. In fact, these are our very own hired mortals, security cleared and all. If you can’t cope with them, you are surely going to have trouble when we go to Mass this evening.”

“When we what?”

“Go to Mass.” Nefer grinned. “Every day, rain or shine. Three miles’ walk each way. Rainy days we get to use the coach. Don’t tell me you weren’t briefed on this. We’re Spaniards, remember? And you really were one. You of all people ought to know the drill.”

“Shit.” I put my face in my hands. “They’ll be all around us at Mass.”

“That’s right.” She sat down on my bed. “Look, Mendoza. In the entire time I’ve been in the service, you know how many homicidal maniacs I’ve encountered? One. And he weighed seventy pounds. Mortals may prey on one another, but they’re not all that much of a threat to us. Believe me, sooner than you think, you’ll get used to being around them, and you’ll find you can actually eat with them, have conversations with them, uh, sleep with them even—”

“You’re kidding!” I sat bolt upright. Nefer may have blushed, but with her somewhat Moorish complexion it was hard to tell.

“I didn’t mean like that. But … well, you know … that happens too, actually. Quite a bit, if you want the truth.”

“You aren’t serious! We were always told, Never Engage in Sexual Recreation Except with Another Operative!”

Nefer looked at the floor, looked at the ceiling, looked out the window. “Sexual recreation with other operatives,” she said finally, to the wall, “is … sort of dull. And uncomfortable. Say, what are you working on?”

“My assignment. Uncomfortable how?”

“Just, you know, embarrassing. Is that the genetic code for some kind of plant?”

“It’s maize. American maize.” I displayed the screen proudly. “See? We’re playing Spaniards, so we’d have access to strange-looking stuff from the New World, right? And the coloration and viral streaking on this variety are really spectacular. It’ll knock that Englishman’s eyes out. I can have the seeds ready by January.”

“That’s great.”

“And it can’t mess up the biosystem over there at all, because it doesn’t grow well in England and it’ll never catch on there as a major food source. It’s not nourishing enough, for one thing.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. Maize is the biggest of the domesticated grains, but as a food source it’s a dud because it’s got this incomplete protein, see.”

“You don’t say.”

I was going to tell her about amino acids, but her eyes were glazing over. I looked down at my calculations and sighed.

“I know everything there is to know about New World flora. God, I wish they’d sent me there.”

“Oh, well, you’ll go one of these days,” Nefer reassured me. “I wouldn’t mind a good look at a llama myself.”

Specialists. One-track minds.

On that long, long daily walk to Mass, Nefer and I had quite a lot of conversations about sheep, as I recall. We became pretty good friends, but her interest in life was hoofed quadrupeds, and to hear her tell it, you could forget about the pyramids: the height of Egyptian achievement had been the domestication of the wild ass. In our endless trudges together I learned things about water buffalo I have since labored in vain to forget. I did my best to introduce her to the exciting world of four-lobed grains, but she kept getting that glassy look in her eyes.

Still, the walks had to be taken, because there was no question of our missing Mass. We made solid identities for ourselves in the neighborhood. We did not become well known, of course; that was not the Company way. Not one of his neighbors could have told you much about Don Ruy Anzolabejar, other than that his uncle had been connected somehow with the Inquisition, and certainly that magic word put a damper on gossip. It was known that Don Ruy traveled frequently to Court. But there were no stories about strange devices or supernatural lights in our windows at night, no indeed. No heretical talk about tolerance or enlightenment or sanitation. We made sure we were an utterly unremarkable Spanish family.

I spent more time on my knees that year than in the rest of my life to date.

I did get used to the presence of mortals. I could sit there at Mass among them, though bombarded by the smells of their humanity: dissatisfactions, diseases, passions, hormonal tides, digestive upsets, religious raptures. I learned to ignore the pathetic beauty of their children and the horror of their old age. And, once, there was a young man, a student by the cut and shabbiness of his clothes, who sat and stared at me with smoldering eyes. I stared back at him, wondering what on earth was the matter, until he mouthed a request at me across the church.

My shock and amusement reverberated loud enough to alert Nefer, who came out of her reverie on bison long enough to look around at the boy and glare at him in a proper duenna way. He averted his eyes at once and slunk out right after Communion. Too silly to be disgusting, but the incident stuck in my mind somehow.

I remember that the weather was hell. The clear and windless night I arrived had been a rare one: most days the wind came roaring across the miles of wheatfields and filled the sky with dust. White haze hid the mountains and hung like a mirror in the air. I developed a permanent squint, which has done nothing for my looks, to keep that furnace glare out of my skull. When summer was over, the wind did not lessen; it only turned cold.

Sometimes, though … I remember the sound that that wind made, coming over those fields of wheat. It was like the sea. I used to walk far, far across the open land, till the house was almost out of sight behind me, and stand there in the high wheat only listening. The wind would begin in one place and come across to me, sighing like voices, silvering the tops of the grain.

Then harvest came and men with scythes came and cut it all down. There was sweet-smelling stubble for a while, but the wind did not sing coming across it, and the autumn fogs were thick with dust.

The news that winter was that things were already beginning to sour for Mary in England. She had announced her betrothal to Philip, our prince; the English, as everyone had predicted, were furious. Rebellion was working all through the country, and popular sentiment lay not with poor little Lady Jane, the previous Protestant candidate, but with Elizabeth.

Unlikely Elizabeth. For years she’d been a zero politically; no ambitious nobles tried to use her to further their careers, since it was rumored she was a tawdry sexpot like her mother the Great Whore. Suddenly nobody remembered those nasty innuendos: the same people who used to call her the Little Whore now saw her as a virtuous Protestant princess, the Reformation’s only hope in England. Elizabeth smiled her cold smile and demurred graciously—she knew what was likely to happen to people who rocked the throne. All the same, Mary didn’t trust her not to become the focus of a coup attempt. Just before Christmas she had Elizabeth sent away to a remote country estate where, it was said, the princess was beginning to show signs of heavy metal poisoning …

After Christmas came interminable rains that turned the roads to clay. No excuse for us to stay home from Mass; we took the wagon, and still had to slop back and forth from the door, holding our skirts up out of the mud. Only Joseph went out anywhere else, tending his little plots and plans at Court. The rest of us mostly huddled around the fire in the kitchen, accessing novels or holos or staring out the windows at the landscape.

A day came when a man led a horse to the edge of the nearest field. He hitched it to the traces of a plow. Man and horse began to move, and the earth crested and broke dark beneath them like a wave. Away down the plain they went, cutting a long stripe on the land, turned at some point and came back, and at length doubled back again, and so down once more.

All day I watched. By nightfall the field had a weave on it like the fabric of my overskirt. The next day, men came and walked the long lines, casting seed into the furrows. The next day, the field was alive with birds, and the next day, it rained. That was the day I set out my maize seedlings in the earth I’d prepared for them, closed around by the garden wall. There was no more chance of frost now, anyone could have told from the feel and the smell of the air. The earth was black and wet. Bright green as flames were the little blades of corn.

Late in February, Joseph came back from Madrid with the news: open rebellion had finally broken out in England and been promptly squashed. As a further punitive measure, Mary had Lady Jane Grey (still on ice from the previous coup) summarily executed.

“Well, there,” I remarked from where I shivered by the fire, trying to make sense of
Tirant lo Blanc
. “I knew she died sometime.”

Eva flashed an access code at me. “
Lady Jane
, Helena Bonham-Carter, Cary Elwes, Patrick Stewart.”

“Real pointless business, too.” Joseph poured himself a sherry. “Mary’d much rather have disposed of her sister, but Elizabeth’s too popular with the people. She’s got her locked up in London now, letting the poisoners have another shot at her. When that doesn’t work, she’ll try sending her to the Tower, to see if the English will stand for it.”

“Will they?” Nefer moved a pawn, and Flavius leaned forward to study the chessboard.

“No. Mary has no idea how unpopular she really is. She’s sure this rebellion problem is confined to Kent.”

“Kent?” I registered alarm. “The rebellion’s in Kent? Kent where I’m being posted?”

“It
was
in Kent. Was. Past tense,” Joseph soothed. “By the time you’re there, everything will be dullsville. Would we ever send you anywhere dangerous?”

“You don’t think this sounds dangerous?” retorted Flavius. “I’d like to see sometime what you consider dangerous. Every single time I’ve been shipped over there, they’ve told me—”

“Take it easy, friends.” Joseph held up his hands. “We can but trust Dr. Z, after all. We may catch a rotten egg or two but no sticks or stones, I positively guarantee it. Trust me.”

“I don’t think I’m happy about going to Kent, Joseph,” I said, with considerable restraint I thought.

He surveyed us all with a sympathetic expression.

“What we have here is a morale problem, that’s all,” he told us. “Poor kids, cooped up with nowhere to go. But I just happened to have stopped in at the transport warehouse on my way back …” He hauled his rain-soaked saddlebag up on the table and rummaged through it. “… where they just happened to have got in a new shipment.” Beaming, he pulled out the silver-wrapped bars and tossed one to each of us.

“Theobromos!” cried Eva. I tore open mine and inhaled the fragrance hungrily. Almost at once the buzz set in. This was powerful stuff, nearly Toblerone quality.

“Highest grade Guatemalan,” Joseph informed us. He struck the same pose as the little togaed Greek on the label, waving cheerily.

The fields changed again. There had been a mist, pale and close along the ground; then one day the blades of new wheat stood up green in the sun. Greener. Deeper. A solid carpet of green, going out to the edge of the sky. There was no more rain now, and the green went to silver as the wheat began to come into the ear.

My maize was standing high, setting big ears like clubs, showing bright tassels. I would drag a settle out into the garden and sit for hours, just watching the wind sway the corn. Our mortal servants would come to stare at it in silence; they’d notice me there apparently reading my missal, and edge away with a bow or curtsey.

Another exciting day: I was issued two new gowns for the trip to England. They arrived via courier from the transport station and, once unwrapped, proved to be not exactly the height of current fashion, which was a disappointment. One was a brown broad-cloth thing for working in that looked like a servant’s livery. Still, it gave me something to wear besides my peach wool, which looked smashing on me but was fast wearing out.

Was I ever really that bored girl, pining for new gowns? Time, time, time.

Joseph held up his knife, eyed the chunk of potato skewered there.

“I love potatoes,” he remarked. “How I used to wait in longing for 1492. Before then you could only get them if you were stationed in the New World. Or occasionally at the transport station commissaries, but then of course they were instant mashed. Little whipped peaks of starch and gray gravy.”

We all sat staring at him. The wind howled relentlessly outside. It was June, 1554. He took a little bite of potato and chewed slowly, staring back at us.

“Now, before the Crusades,” he continued with his mouth full, “food was even more limited. Bland, bland, bland. Not even cinnamon, except in the bread pudding at the transport station commissaries—”

“When are we leaving?” demanded Flavius.

“Next week. By coach overland to La Coruña, where we have a berth on the
Virgin Mary
. It isn’t exactly a stateroom—hell, it isn’t exactly a cabin—but I’ve pulled some rank and greased some palms, so we should be reasonably comfortable.”