Wildfire (59 page)

 

  
I moved the pot off the brazier and sat beside Meninx and pillowed her head on my thighs. She said, “This one cursed the left hand, but what was the use, to curse a curse, ein?”

 

  
I stroked her forehead with my left hand and was shocked to feel how
cold she was. As I warmed her, I sang,
The rushes do grow green, all agreen-oh.
I’d forgotten everything but the refrain, so I made up words in Lambaneish to go with those in the Low, singing,

 

  

 

  
In spring flies south the speedeedee,

 

  
The rushes grow agreen-oh.

 

  
Bring my sweetheart home to me,

 

  
Oh, oh, the rushes grow,

 

  

 

  
and other such nonsense—I knew not what.

 
  

 

  
The next morning a whore visited the arthygater in the bathing room. This amazed me, for in Corymb women of the Blood do not mingle with whores, much less converse with them in the manner of friends of long acquaintance. There was no mistaking her profession, for she wore a magenta wrapper with narrow stripes of saffron, embroidered with corona flowers in gold thread. Her shawl was gossamer silk. I’d learned the Lambaneish way of estimating a woman’s wealth and good taste by the thread, weave, and dyes of her clothing, and the quality and number of beadcoins strung on the long fringe of her net cap. By those measures she was wealthy indeed.

 

  
Arthygater Katharos gave her a shawl embroidered with white apple blossoms on a bough splotched with silver lichens; in thanks, she said, for embodying Eikenain with such grace, such passion; she had brought tears to the arthygater’s eyes; everyone was talking about the night of the white petals, and would be talking about it for years. After this pretty speech the whore, Aeidin by name, made one of her own, thanking the arthygater gracefully, eloquently, and without fawning like a limpet.

 

  
When she undressed I saw she bore a tattooed serpent like Arthygater Katharos; but her serpent girdled the hips, and its tail wrapped around one thigh, and its triangular head rested on the smooth mound where her womansbeard would be if it hadn’t been shaved off. I’d thought the tattoos and the Serpent Cult were only for princesses, for royalty.

 

  
I wondered what they would converse about, these two adepts of the cult. Perhaps they would speak of their rites and powers, here where no men could eavesdrop. But while I shaved the arthygater and Aeidin, they sifted gossip. Aeidin knew a man with gambling debts, who could be bought—but could he be trusted? The arthygater didn’t like his connections, but with debts so great surely he would be grateful. Aeidin had spoken to so-and-so, a Contender in the Ministry of Order, who wished to lease the arthygater’s grazing lands on the slopes of Lachesos for the sum of twelve hundred weight in silver a year; and such-and-such a man, an Exor
cisor in the Ministry of Purity, had pledged a loan of a hundred thousand weight in gold coins.

 

  
A hundred thousand weight in gold. I couldn’t conceive of it.

 

  
Aeidin said, “What news from Malleus?”

 

  
The arthygater smiled. “Trust you to hear when there’s something to be heard. A thrush arrived from Incus. He had to beat his way against the trade winds all down the coast, but he made it. This man says King Thyrse is dead. He was wounded in the battle and died soon after.”

 

  
My left hand shook as I cut the arthygater’s nails. She’d told Aeidin she wanted two of them cut in the beak style, with two prongs, saying it would awaken her husband’s jealousy, which would arouse him and please her. They had laughed.

 

  
“Who is his heir?” Aeidin said.

 

  
“He left many bastards, but no heir,” the arthygater said. “The Firsts met in council and chose the First of Lynx, this thrush says. Nobody that anybody has heard of. I daresay he won’t be king long.”

 

  
Could that be the same First of Lynx from the Marchfield? I remembered him riding out to meet the Crux on the tourney field with his head bare, showing his white hair and gray beard. He had been respected, but was not among King Thyrse’s close advisors, not like the First of Crux. Maybe the Crux had taken the advice of his Council of the Dead to put forward a weak man, a man without enemies, and rule the clans by ruling him.

 

  
Aeidin said, “So the clans will fight each other?”

 

  
“At present they are too busy squabbling with the queenmother. The clans of Corymb are agreed on one thing, and that is hatred of her Wolves. But it hasn’t come to outright battle yet, the man says, so everyone pretends it’s only hotspurs clashing in the streets.”

 

  
I took Aeidin’s foot by the heel, to rub her sole with a pumice stone. The skin was already soft, as if she didn’t tread the same hard ground as the rest of us. She said, “The war is won. Why don’t they take their plunder and go home?”

 

  
“Would you go back to Corymb if you could have Incus? If you could have both?”

 

  
“I wouldn’t have either,” Aeidin said. “They are full of strange-ignorant people, and the winters are too long.”

 
  

 

  
The syrup had crystallized on the slices of sweetrush root. I tasted a slice and it was sweet and a little bitter, and spicy enough to make my eyes water. I wrapped them in leaves tied with twine, five slices to a packet, and put them in my gather sack. I left the palace by the tharais gate, and in a deserted alley I donned my tharos wrapper and shawl and hid the tharais cloths in the maw
of a drainpipe. I had brought with me a large bunch of fresh-picked swallowwort. I crushed the green stems and smeared the bright saffron sap on my forearms and the backs of my hands. The color was mottled, but the sap was the best substitute I could find for the yellow powder tharos women wore. Every day a servant carried some of this powder to the bathing room in a gem-studded box, but she took it away again as soon as the bathing was done.

 

  
I returned to the palace barefaced. The kind day porter was still at the gate with his dog. The wolfhound knew me, though the man did not. I told the porter I was a peddler, and he let me in the tharos hindgate for a promise of two pewter beadcoins on the way out.

 

  
There was another porter to pass, the one at the manufactory door. I’d expected a formidable guard, an Ebanakan perhaps, like the warriors employed by the arkhon, but he was a reed-thin lad, and his price was even lower than that of the gate porter. I gave him a packet of candied root, and he winked as if we shared a secret, probably supposing I was a go-between with a message for one of the weavers. His key was the size and shape of a hand, and the lock ornate and heavy. But what did a strong lock matter if the man with the key was weak?

 

  
Inside the manufactory I stood under the vaulted roof of an arcade and watched textrices strolling the courtyard and sitting on the rim of the fountain. The last banners of evening flew high above the pear tree, lemon yellow clouds over the green roofs. I thought of the napkin Polukhaitais, and how her nose had been struck off in punishment for the offense of pretending to be tharos—an offense I was even now committing—and I shivered and stepped out of the darkness under the arcade, and walked the courtyard paths as if I still belonged there.

 

  
There were waves of sound from peepers in the pool, and women’s voices rising and falling, and I heard Catena laugh before I saw her. She was sitting on the ground with several girls her own age, giggling and playing a game of fast and loose with a spindle and a length of twine. She looked younger than I remembered. Maybe I expected her to look older because I’d lived two lifetimes among the tharais since I’d seen her last. Her bronze-colored hair wasn’t as unruly as mine, and it had grown out in fleecy little curls. She was as plump now as when I’d first met her. Arthygater Katharos measured judiciously, so much work for so much sustenance. Her textrices did not starve.

 

  
I stood before Catena, who stared at me openmouthed, and I said, “Why so shy? Did you forget me?” I held out both hands to her and she stood and embraced me, tucking easily under my arm. “Well, well,” I said, squeezing her tightly, and I couldn’t stop smiling.

 

  
A woman called out in Lambaneish, and she knew me by name, though I’d forgotten hers. “Look, Feirthonin! She has hair now!”

 

  
Red-haired Agminhatin, whom I recalled from the weaving room, said, “How did you get in here? I thought you’d been made tharais and sent to the dyers, ein?”

 

  
I held out my arms to show her the skin was tinted yellow. It was fortunate that after a tennight in the bathing room my hands were at last free of the red dyestains. “Who says so? Zostra? She says that to scare you, ein? So you’ll do how she says. As you see, I’m no dyer. The arthygater sells me as tharos, more coins for her that way.”

 

  
“Good,” she said, and grinned. “And what did you do to Zostra, ein?”

 

  
“What do you mean?”

 

  
Agminhatin gave me a little push on my shoulder. “I don’t mind. She deserved it.”

 

  
“Deserved what?”

 

  
“She had a bad dream of a viper underfoot, and she withered up and died.”

 

  
Catena and I made the avert sign, and Agminhatin laughed. I said, “I swear I do not send a dream. Zostra offends of a meneidon—or the mistress, maybe, by stealing too much, ein?” I almost said,
This one swears.

 

  
Agminhatin raised her eyebrows. “It’s not that I blame you—I’d have done the same if I knew how. But the new taskmistress is even worse. Perhaps you can send her a nightmare too, ein? She’s made my life a misery, telling me to unravel a day’s work for nothing, just to show she can.”

 

  
I said, “I can’t help you. I’m not a—” I couldn’t think of a word for hex just then in Lambaneish. The closest I could come was throws-filth-in-clean-water, but that could not be the best way to say it.

 

  
I walked away from Agminhatin so she would ask no more questions, but she followed. Catena and I strolled arm in arm to the fountain, where many women were sitting on the rim of the pool, gossiping, Dulcis and Nitida among them. They greeted me with warmth, and soon Dulcis began to chatter like a chiffchaff about a new suitor, and I was wholeheartedly grateful that she was more interested in herself than me. By now I knew Lambaneish well enough to realize that she spoke it wretchedly, though she’d lived here so many years.

 

  
We sat under the pear tree on a soft turf of sweet-smelling maythen. The sky was already speckled with stars, and it was almost time for everyone to retire upstairs to the sleeping porch. Catena asked me in the High if I had come back to stay, and I answered the same way.

 

  
Agminhatin said, “What are you saying?”

 

  
I said in Lambaneish, “That I do not stay, I only visit.”

 

  
“Who do you serve now?”

 

  
Many of the women who had gathered at the fountain had drifted after
us, and sat down nearby on the railings between columns, or the turf between paved paths. Novelty was welcome in the manufactory, where days were as like to one another as throws of a shuttle. The women waited for my answer, and the silence lingered.

 

  
I said, “I’m a peddler, ein?”

 

  
“What are you peddling?” Nitida asked.

 

  
“Sometimes one thing, sometimes another. Tonight I have sweetroot for sweet dreams. Delicious, ein? Each for a beadcoin or a skein of thread.” I opened several packets of candied root and passed them around. “If you eat five pieces you dream of coupling with one you desire.” This was a lie—sweetrush was potent in many ways, but I’d never heard that was one of them. I got the idea from Mai, who used to sell a charm for the same purpose; she never would tell me what was in it.

 

  
Every peddler should have a song, so I made one using remnants of melody from some other tune. I sang,

 

  

 

  
From sweet root grows sweetrush.

 

  
Grows a dream, dream a dream.

 

  
The one you desire, desires you.

 

  

 

  
A weaver leaned forward and passed me a pewter beadcoin, saying, “I’ll buy some. All my dreams are dull. Last night I dreamed of an orange tree with oranges hanging down like beads, and the night before I dreamed of an orange-painted wall. A friend showed me this wall and said she didn’t want her husband to see it.”

 

  
I said, “These are not dull dreams, these are fruitful—oranges hanging like beadcoins on a cap. Also a secret hidden to a husband behind a wall of women. The higher a woman’s rank, the more orange her wrapper, ein? The color of saffron on silk. So you dream of a woman of high rank, maybe the arthygater, she does somewhat behind her husband’s back and prospers by it. Perhaps you have a third orange dream—orange is also the color of the meneidon Lynx, Lynx Foresight we call her in Incus, because she gives true foretellings, ein? Perhaps she reveals the woman and her secret. But don’t trust any dream with a little boy, or mice or rats, ein? Beware of those.”

 

  
By the time I stopped talking, everyone was listening as if what I said was profound. I didn’t see why; no doubt most of the high-ranking women of Lambanein kept secrets from their husbands, and profited behind their backs.

 

  
Dulcis reached for more slices of sweetrush root. “I know you want a dream of your bow-legged rider,” someone shouted, and Dulcis giggled, covering her mouth.

 

  
Someone said, “Dulcis doesn’t care who rides her, so long as she can be a night mare.”

 

  
A woman clapped and sang out,
Ai, ai, ai, I ride a fine stallion. Ai, ai, ai, no geldings for me.
She stood and swayed, and another woman got up and they entwined arms. The second woman sang,
Ai, ai, ai, Old Zostra tried to hit me, ai, ai, ai, I trod on her flail,
and the first sang,
Ai, ai, ai, Old Klothin tried to hit me, ai, ai, ai, I emptied her pail.