Neveryona (27 page)

Laughing, Madame Keyne said:
‘I
thought they were too busy laughing to hear a thing! Though it’s true, writing to you across that little gulf that you could not speak over for your reasons and I would not for mine, for all the sinister laughter about us – and bandits, slavers, or smugglers, it was certainly sinister enough! – I have never felt so intimate with another human as I did that night, nor felt I could be more honest, or more – ’

‘Ah!’ Jade threw up a hand. ‘You just cannot admit you are wrong!’

Madame Keyne looked puzzled.

They were
not
slavers! Or smugglers! They were bandits. And they listened to every word we said, determined to rob us on the least pretext!’

‘Quite probably they
were
bandits!’ declared Madame Keyne. ‘Most likely I
was
wrong. Rob us? No doubt they needed no pretext at all!’

‘We were in the south,’ declared Jade. ‘The south is my country, not yours!’

‘We were indeed thirty, almost forty, stades south of Kolhari.’ Madame Keyne shook her head again, again smiling. ‘And the next morning, you made us leave the inn and return to the city – it was too dangerous, you said. So we never did complete our business that trip.’

‘See! You
cannot
admit you were wrong,’ Jade cried. ‘You must always be right!’

‘It is very easy for me not to be right – most probably I was not right. There is a definite possibility I was – definitely – wrong. There is a definite possibility that the probability was large, huge, overwhelming. Certainly there was no need to take chances. I admit to it all! The only thing I
cannot
admit to is that … I believe what I don’t believe!’

‘I hate that in you!’

‘I do not love it in you, either!’

Jade looked down. ‘But you went back, two weeks later, and completed what business you had. Alone.’

‘Yes.’ Madame Keyne sighed. ‘I did. Ah, I missed you on that trip. All the bandits and slavers and smugglers seemed to have melted away. And there was no one to sit on the bed’s edge with in the lamplight at evening and write notes to. Without you, it was only dull business.’

‘I do not like to travel,’ Jade said. ‘Business trips, the rushing, the inconvenience, being gawked at by strangers, the small talk with new acquaintances that one will forget
ever having known in a week – that is for you. It’s not to my taste. When I come to a new town, a new city, I like to stay in one place for a time, to live there, to meet the street girls and talk to the market vendors, to learn the names of its alleys and avenues; I like to find myself a little garden and walk in it a while. You, Rylla, you run through cities and towns and villages as if they were all suburbs of one great city in which you could never quite find your home. It’s as if you were afraid to hear what your own thoughts might say to you were you to move slowly enough for them to overtake you.’

‘I think it is fear that I might have to read the results of my own actions inscribed on the pliable wax of the world.’ Madame Keyne sighed again.

‘You talk too much and travel too fast,’ Jade said. That’s why you’re so unhappy.’

‘I suppose, when I am unhappy, that is, indeed, the reason. But what was so important on that trip we took together was not the sort of things we say to each other now, but rather what, that night, you wrote to me, what I wrote to you. There, outside my garden walls, I think I felt that what I wrote was, finally and nakedly, private, safe from any spy – ’

‘There, hemmed in by the fear of all I did not know about me, I thought that what I felt was nakedly, totally public, overseen by all eyes, overheard by all ears – ’

‘Yet it was honest. You felt that, didn’t you? That it was honest?’

‘Though I may have been impelled to honesty through fear for my life, yes, it was more honest than I had ever felt I could be with another person.’ Jade smiled. ‘But your writing, Rylla, in the shaping of your signs,
is
atrocious! There were words I was not even sure of that night!’

‘As you wrote to me. Several times. And I’ve tried to
do better.’ Madame Keyne laughed. ‘But that is why I need a secretary. And you suffered to read my messages, and responded with your own, as beautiful as the script in which you scribed them; you struggled to make out whatever, and however clumsily, I meant.’

Jade sighed, i have often wondered if simply because of those frightening men in the next room, you were not just driven, like some slave lashed on by an overseer’s whip, to come closer to your own real thoughts while we wrote to one another that night – ’

‘And I have often wondered if, because writing is so different from speaking, so much slower, so much more considered, if you weren’t forced to consider, slowly, what you really felt – ’

‘Well,’ Jade said, ‘I suppose it’s the same thing – ’

‘ – produces the same results,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘Works the same way.’

‘It was wonderful, certainly! And yet so strange – ’ Jade gave a little shudder. ‘But you are right, Rylla. I feel as though I am at all times observed; and I am paralyzed by those eternally judging eyes – or, when I am not paralyzed, I am frightened to the point of anger, of incoherence, of rage. Often I’ve even felt that it was you who observed me, you who judged me. And then I have been at my worst, certainly. At least to you. But I know, and always have known, finally, that it was not you. You, too, feel you are always observed; but you read in that fancied attention the benevolence, the approval, the applause of the market for the mummers. Your life seems to all about you nothing but success – and without your successes, there would be only failure for me. Often I think it isn’t fair.’

‘You are right,’ Madame Keyne said, it isn’t.’

‘At other times, I only wish I could confront, once and for all, the stranger who is always gazing at me, just out
of my line of sight, who is always overhearing what I say and finding it silly or selfish or wrong. If I could truly create such a confrontation, I would be rid of it forever! That I try, so often and so hard, sometimes seems to be the only thing in the world that makes my life worth living.’

‘You are right,’ Madame Keyne said. There is nothing more important than that perpetual and repeated confrontation with the nameless ones. Otherwise one can never become free, can never remain free.’

‘And sometimes I think the difference between you and me is that I
have
at least tried to engage them directly, that I have at least tried, however frightened I was, to look at them, whereas you have not – not really. You have never listened intently to their breathing just behind your shoulder. You have never turned suddenly to stare one in the face. If you did, if you could see them, truly know that they were there, you would be as terrified as I, and would know your own weakness, know how unhappy you are.’

‘Again, I think you may be right.’

‘No …’ Jade shook her head. Though I love you, I know you do not believe me. Again, because you cannot admit that you are wrong – ’

Somewhere a branch fell, off in the bushes. One or the other of the two women glanced up from the table with vague curiosity. The other went on talking.

Certainly it was no more than a branch.

But it made Pryn pull sharply back from the window’s edge. She looked about the hedges. She looked back at the window. (Inside, one of them said: ‘I love you, and I know that you love me. That is all I know. That is all I need to know …’ But the voice spoke so softly Pryn did not catch which woman it was, so that the words seemed like a message glimpsed on a discarded clay tablet without
any initialed name above or below, sender and destination forgotten.) The gauze hanging to the sill was as gray as the wall around it. No sun fell through at this hour. Doubtless the women inside, had they looked, could have seen out as easily as Pryn could see in. Really, she must not stay any longer. It just wouldn’t do to be caught here.

Pryn walked along close to the house. Turning the corner, she let herself move out between the bushes.

As she came around by the back door of the kitchen, Gya shoved aside the woven hangings and stepped out. The red scarf around her head was blotched with perspiration. ‘Here’s your supper!’ She handed out a basket. Things in it were wrapped in large leaves.

Pryn pulled one loose: strips of celery, cut turnips, and carrots fell out. And a sizable piece of roasted meat. There was a jar with a wooden stopper, whose surface was still damp and about which she could smell apples. Could it be cider … ? There was also a small, dark loaf. ‘Thank you!’

The housekeeper stood on the doorstep, scratching at the hip of her skirt.

Pryn broke off a piece of the loaf and put it in her mouth, to be astonished at its sweetness. (She had tasted neither corn flour nor banana bread before, both of which these were.) She broke off another piece and ate it.

‘And if you see the other, white-headed one, tell her to come and get hers too,’ the hefty woman called. She turned back to the hanging raffia. ‘Though sometimes I do believe that one doesn’t eat at all!’

‘Yes,’ Pryn called again. ‘Thank you! I will!’

Now and again the moon shone blue-white between coursing clouds. Brambles bent and whispered around her. She pulled a branch from dark stone to reveal the darker opening. Had the far end been blocked up? But
she squeezed herself, crouching, into the fissure. She slipped through a memory of narrow, underground corridors. Then moonlight speckled brambles outside the rocks just beyond her left eye. Slipping out sideways, she pushed away chattering branches and stood up in the heavy growth. Pryn gazed over brush that darkened under a cloud, then paled to mottled blue as the cloud dragged off.

There was no light in the great house across the cluttered wilds. Somewhere beyond the house itself, a campfire fluttered beside some outbuilding’s door.

Was that a soldier moving along the great house’s roof? No, Pryn decided. This evening the upper cornices were patrolled only by changes in the moonlight along the cracked balustrade. Dark, the house seemed far bigger than Madame Keyne’s.

Pryn pushed forward, clenching her jaw at the rattling brush.

She was approaching a clear space – and struck her shin.

Hopping back, looking down, holding aside leaves, she saw a stone expanse, which, she realized looking out over it, was why there
was
a clearing. She stepped up on the stone lip.

Across the mossy rock, she saw the sculpted stands, each topped with carved shells, like the ones at the corners of Madame Keyne’s bridge.

She was standing at the edge of a great fountain that no longer worked at all. She looked about for higher ground. In the wild rises around, had time clogged conduits and tributaries with refuse in the same way a little murderess had packed the emblem of her service down a drain?

What am I doing here? she thought, stepped from the lip, and moved around it toward the house. But
he’s
not there …

That was what she knew.

That knowledge had led her to volunteer her services in the first place. But here she was, on the strength of that knowledge charged with a mission which that knowledge, precisely, assured her could not succeed.

This is ridiculous, she mouthed for the seventh time, freeing a twig caught in the coin-filled pocket at one side of her dress, moving a branch that snagged on the knife at the other, now pulling back from thorns that scraped her calf where she’d hiked the dress up for easier maneuvering.

She reached the end of brush and bramble and stepped into what was merely waist-high grass.

That back window – were those cloth hangings inside it? She could climb in. Coming closer, her gaze rose to the roof, whose cracked and crumbled balustrade, as she walked up, approached her in some infinitely delayed topple.

A leaf blew from the roof above to spin and spiral at her, till a texture change in the earth underfoot made her look down – at the window, now before her, with its dark drapes.

Pryn vaulted to the sill, got her feet up, dropped one foot over, pushing back hangings. The cloth was incredibly gritty – she heard it tear. As she jumped down, another cloud drifted from the haloed moon. Light fell through the open roof into the inner court – very like Madame Keyne’s.

Might this, Pryn wondered, be what Madame Keyne’s home would look like in ruins years hence? All furniture had been taken out, the floor tiles broken – five or six benches had been up-ended against the wall –

Footsteps!

Pryn crouched beside one as a thick-necked soldier walked from the stairway across the floor, glanced up at
the moon, then went to the doorway, where he paused in the shadow – a moment later his urine hissed against the door post. Still barefoot, Pryn resolved she would leave by the window she’d entered.

The soldier – no doubt the one she’d thought mere moonlight on the cornice – went.

Slowly, Pryn stood.

There’s no one in the house, she thought. At least no one important. I am alone with the absent Liberator. It was preternaturally silent. She felt like the central figure in a complex joke whose humor was just beyond her; she also felt exorbitantly free, as if her knowledge allowed her to wander, to run, to fly on spined wings anywhere in the moonstruck dark – as long as she flew quetly. She stepped from behind the bench. The dead barbarian …?