Neveryona (26 page)

‘Madame Keyne,’ Pryn declared for, though she was by nature affectionate, not only had she seen something of
fountains in her own home, she had also seen prostitutes in the Ellamon market and had whispered and giggled with the other children about them, ‘you take me from the Bridge of Lost Desire, you give me a handful of coins, then you ask for a kiss … ?’

‘ – like a kiss from a daughter, my dear, expressing her affection to a mother, before she leaves on some necessary journey out into the world, with a coin or two diligently saved and given with concern.’

‘Well,’ Pryn said, ‘I never got along very well with my mother. I didn’t really see much of her.’

‘Very well, then, to a father – if you must; a long-lost father, returning from the wars, in time to catch a peck and a hug before his daughter begins her own eccentric or domestic adventures along whatever courses her own lifetime may take her.’

Though Pryn had not had a father, she had wanted one; but she hesitated a moment more. Finding the pockets, she dropped in the coins, stepped forward, bent, and, blinking, kissed the brown cheek.

One moment, lost in the desert of that warm, dry skin, Pryn thought she understood what had occurred; she let her mouth, then her own cheek, stay against Madame Keyne’s, thinking all the time that a tremor would pass through the woman any moment – or at least expecting to see, as she stepped back now, a tear make an oasis somewhere on that flesh.

Madame Keyne was smiling.

Though not particularly at Pryn.

‘WelI,’ Madame Keyne said after a breath. ‘You gave me that contact, that touch, that communion on your own – freely. Despite all exchanges, which always occur. Nothing compelled you, nothing coerced you. And I shall live off that freedom of yours for … a minute? A month? A lifetime?’ She laughed softly. ‘It was, in its quiet way,
as glorious as if I rode some wild and winged beast, soaring against sun-silvered clouds. Certainly it is worth as much as the caresses Jade wheedles, tricks, blackmails, and cajoles from the Ini.’ Madame Keyne raised an eyebrow, as though responding to a surprise on Pryn’s face that Pryn, at any rate, hadn’t felt. ‘Oh, yes – because I know how innocent we are, I have a measure of how innocent they are. Even if
they
don’t know it – Oh, you may mark it on vellum! Now go. Down to the kitchen with you. You remember Gya, who oversaw your bath and bedding when Ini brought you in last night? She will give you a supper basket at the kitchen door – I think Jade and I shall dine by ourselves tonight. Or, if not, I shall dine alone. Later, when the sun is fully down, you may take this – ’ Madame Keyne picked up the knife and held it out to Pryn – ‘to the break in the corner of my garden that leads through into the garden of the Liberator. If you can contrive an audience with him, ask my question, and return – ’‘But Madame –’

‘Oh, don’t mind about the knife. You should have some small weapon with you. In these vicious and violent times it won’t be taken amiss. Ini has more of them than she needs. One less from her collection is one more bit of trouble I don’t have to worry about her getting into.’

‘Oh, no, Madame – ’ Pryn took the weapon and immediately felt uncomfortable holding it. ‘It’s just that the Liberator isn’t
in
his …’ She stopped. Her meager knowledge – her tiny bit of power – seemed too precious to squander here. ‘Madame Keyne, if you want me to ask the Liberator your question, you must return me to the middle of the city, at the mouth of the Bridge of Lost Desire. From there I’ll be able to find my way to – ’

‘My dear girl, if
that’s
what I must do to have an answer, then I shall do without! Here we have been
talking of responsibility, and you would have me turn you out into the same dangers from which I plucked you? No!’

‘But Madame Keyne – ’

‘You’ve come near getting killed once since you’ve been in my charge. I am not about to repeat the possibility. You will do it my way, or you will
not
do it! I want no more protests, girl. As I told you already, and as Jade herself suspects, the answer is simply not
that
important!’

They sat together in the small, open-roofed chamber. On the counters about them lay clay tablets, shells with styli sticking from them, chisels, brushes. Reeds in bunches soaked in shallow trays of alum water. Rubbed and unrubbed parchment lay piled about, held down from the breeze by small pumice blocks. Against the wall leaned boards covered with yellow wax, boards covered with pink wax, tablet molds, piles of clay tokens, blocks of ink.

The little tripod had not yet been lighted.

‘I thought, because we didn’t get much work done today, you might like to eat in here.’ Jade replaced a flower, fallen to the white cloth, in its vase. ‘We might work later. Here. Together.’

‘Yes.’ Madame Keyne reached into the basket and pulled loose the red scarf tucked about the wicker. ‘A useful idea. A pleasant idea!’

‘Here, let me do that for you!’ Jade took the scarf end from Madame Keyne’s hand and pulled it loose – from large, succulent fruits. ‘And let me see, now. Yes. Gya has given us some of her wonderful small loaves!’ Jade pulled loose a second scarf from a second basket. ‘I asked her to make them when I was dithering about this afternoon. I know how much you like them – Oh, Rylla, I’m afraid I got
no
work done today!’

‘You asked cook … ? Thank you, Jade! I certainly didn’t do very much work myself. Though I suppose I did
get into town and review the construction, earlier on this morning. I have been putting that off for so long. Now I don’t have to think about that for another three days.’

Jade touched a third scarf over a third basket, this one somewhat spotted. It came half away from a cut of meat, gray and rose. Jade paused. ‘You worked today. I did not. Somehow, everything you say indicts me. There is nothing I can do for you that means anything … !’

Madame Keyne was silent a moment. Then she reached out and put her hand on top of Jade’s. ‘I would have nothing meaningful in my life if I did not have you and all that you do for me, all that you are to me.’

Their joined hands pulled away the scarf. Jade had washed the clay from her fingers. Only a bit clung about her nails. ‘Sometimes, Rylla – ’ Jade held Madame Keyne’s hand more firmly, then more gently – ‘you are very cruel.’

‘Because I love you?’

‘Because when I become resentful, become confused, when I become frightened and lash out, at you, at myself, at everyone, you do not stop me.’ Looking down, she withdrew her fingers to the white cloth’s edge.

‘How could I … ?’ Madame Keyne looked bewildered.

‘You could say, in the middle of it, or before it even began, at any point …’ Jade looked away from the table. ‘Oh, it
is
hard to say!
I
cannot say it. It would be easier to write it – ! You could say – ’ She blinked at Madame Keyne – ‘ “Jade, I love you.” ’ Shaking her head, the secretary suddenly, quietly smiled. ‘Is it so surprising that when I am at my least lovable that is when I most need to know your love? If only I could hear that from you during those terrible times, then I could become myself again.’

‘You have said that before. Yet it always surprises me.’

‘You have acted on it before. If you never had, I could
not have stayed in this confining garden. And yet, because from time to time you withhold it, it is hard for me not to feel that – from time to time – my humiliation is something you inflict on me, you create in me, you exploit for purposes that are beyond me to understand – ’

‘Oh, Jade!’ Madame Keyne leaned forward and took both her secretary’s hands, drawing them across the table top. A bracelet clinked against the vase. ‘No …’ (The replaced flower fell again to the cloth-covered table.) The women leaned forward from their backless stools, it is hard for me, Jade, in a circle of my own servants, with Ini there, with that girl, Pryn, simply to
say
such things – ’

‘It is hard for you, with me rolling and screaming in the dirt, to
feel
such things – ’

‘No …’ Madame Keyne sat back. ‘No, I feel them. It is only as I said.’

‘Yet that is still what I hear when you say it.’

‘And because I know that is how you read it, I must take the responsibility for it as though I had actually marked it on vellum myself.’ There was something of questioning, something of dismay in Madame Keyne’s inflection. But who could say what the proportions were?

‘You could have stopped me,’ Jade repeated.

‘You stopped the Ini. That was the important thing. As for the rest …’ Madame Keyne shrugged. Then she shook her head. ‘My poor, my dear, my most radiant Jade. You have your bad habits. I have mine. And there are, alas, some things it is simply – and habitually – hard for me to do, in public.’

‘Public? But we are all within your garden walls! You have brought us all here – the servants, even the Ini, even that girl. What public is that?’

‘I have allowed each of you to come, for your own reasons – and mine. To each, I have my responsibilities, which again involve my reasons with theirs – and yours.
Were I some crazed aristocrat, living a neighborhood away, I might read into such a situation some absolute power to influence all about me unto life and death. But I’m not, and I can’t. Oh, certainly I can abuse the power I have. If a servant’s face or gait displease me, I may say, “Your work is performed not quite to the style that I desire,” and dismiss him. If some house girl’s manners or politics are too unsettling or too loud, I might – depending on her gait and face – say much the same. But the nameless gods have decreed that there will be enough young women both comely, intelligent, and poor so that the rich and powerful can exploit desire in the name of labor – the rich who can read and decipher desire’s complex signs – in such a way that power here will reproduce itself there, and we may learn from those paupers at once beautiful and egregious – ’

‘But it’s true, Rylla! You
are
always in public – even within your own gardens: you are always prepared for some fancied spy to observe you from the bushes, overhear you from the eaves.’

‘And you, Jade, are always in private, terrified lest someone see you, someone judge you, someone condemn you; and your better nature is paralyzed under expectation of that perpetual gaze, that eternal acuteness that is everywhere about to break in on your privacy and fill it with anxiety. Only when you feel shored up against all such eyes and ears can your better nature speak.’

‘But because
you
are always within the publicity of your servants, your employees, your acquaintances, your friends, and – yes – your lover, you are condemned to
have
no better nature. I know that you are a very lonely woman, Rylla. And your loneliness is not what I love about you – it is too much like mine. I think what I love is the illusion of an inner privacy that might, somehow, be
made
public …’

When Jade was silent a while, Madame Keyne said: ‘When your illusions collapse – or when mine do – then we both need to hear, “I love you,” from the other. No, it is not so much to ask: that we speak our truest thought clearly.’

Jade smiled again. ‘Do you remember, Rylla, when you took me on that business trip to the south?’

‘Ah!’ Madame Keyne rocked back on her stool. Coming forward, she seized her secretary’s hands again with a desperate eagerness. ‘How could I forget!’

In her own eagerness, Jade pulled one hand away to gesture. ‘Remember, we stopped at that inn where that bandit gang had also taken rooms for the night?’

‘I thought they were slavers, or only young smugglers – and there were no more than three! – who had sold off their wares and thought it would look more respectable to appear as honest highwaymen!’ Madame Keyne laughed.

‘I was so terrified! And they had the room right beside ours, with the thinnest wall between. They drank so loudly and made so much noise! I was afraid to speak, even in a whisper, for fear we should be overheard – ’

‘Ah, yes!’ Madame Keyne sat back. ‘But we had our business that had to be gone over that night. So I took a waxed writing board and scratched you a note – ’

‘ – and, trembling, I scratched one back to you.’ Jade smiled. ‘I was sure they would hear the stylus in the wax itself and be able to know just from the sound what we exchanged between us!’

‘Exactly
what you wrote me! I was quite surprised.’

‘And you wrote back: “I love you more than life and wealth and they will never know of it. “ Or was it “wealth and life” – ?’

‘I think it was “breath and wealth.” Or was it “light and
breath” – ? No matter; it was the right matter for the time!’

‘It was the right matter to calm my fear – enough so I could tell you of my terror.’

‘My wonderful Jade – you used to be terrified of so many things, back then. Slavers who were bandits; bandits who might be slavers – ’

‘Yet as we sat on the edge of the bed, passing the board back and forth, concentrating so hard on what we glyphed into its surface, now rolling the scrapings away and sticking them to the board’s bottom, staring at the board in the candlelight without even looking at each other, stopping to thumb out an ill-scribed sign – ’

‘Oh, I always watched you, Jade – at least when I wasn’t writing!’

‘ – yet our questions and answers seemed to go so quickly by and through our business for the night … and moved on to other things, other thoughts, till at last we were writing back and forth of our most intimate feelings, our most intimate fears. It was as if the stylus itself were aimed at just those hidden parts of our souls. It was as though the wax already bore the signs and only waited for us to scratch the excess away to reveal the truth. And all the while, those evil folk in the next room laughed and listened, listened and laughed!’