Wildfire (67 page)

  
I told Catena and Migra where they would find the stairway to the arthygater’s bathing room, and gave them the crossbar. Carrying it had made me feel brave, but they had more need of it. “The door has a latch, but not a very strong one. You break it with this, ein? I know of no safer hiding place. Now go, go!” I stood against the wall and watched the women pass, and there were more than I’d expected, nearly a score of them, not counting the children. Nitida was at the rear with the lantern, herding stragglers. I was surprised to see Agminhatin at her side, carrying a child under one arm. A look passed between us and I waved her on.

 

  
I was in the dark. The lanterns of our pursuers bobbed as they ran toward me. I’d halted by the waste jars for the tharais dormitory, just where the smell was rankest. I didn’t want to breathe if it meant taking that smell into my nose and throat, and yet I had to. I gagged as I wrestled a heavy jar out of the niche above the tunnel floor. It broke when it fell, and flooded the floor of the tunnel with piss. I cast down another pot and another, and lastly a jar full of shit, making a barrier no tharos would willingly cross: a large puddle of filth, full of broken crockery.

 

  
The man with the lantern was too intent on me to notice what was on the ground between us. He splashed in the puddle and cursed, and I crowed with delight to see him dance backward, his legs jerking as if he wished to abandon the soles of his feet. “Koprophagais bitch!” he shouted. “I’m going to kill you!”

 

  
The three men behind him stopped short of getting their feet wet, but they didn’t dare laugh at him, for he was the arthygater’s nephew, Kydos. Runnels of slime oozed toward them.

 

  
I stood on the other side of the barrier with my feet and garments splattered and reeking. Only a tharais, a filthy tharais, would have done such a filthy thing. So I must be tharais then, foul all the way through, inside and out, and though it should have shamed me, I wasn’t ashamed just then. I was proud of it.

 

  
Arkhyios Kydos wanted to twist my neck, but he would not cross the moat, though it was as shallow as a puddle. I laughed at the revulsion and rage on his face. He couldn’t bear to be thwarted. Why else bother to chase a small band of women through the tunnels, when there were so many left in the manufactory to amuse him?

 

  
Someone asked, “Who is she?” Another bent over and retched, then backed away, still clutching his belly. I turned and ran into the dark. I’d been like a vaunting hotspur, staying to savor victory, but all I tasted now was bitter rue. I heard Sire Rodela’s hammering laughter in my ear, and
before me in the dark a scrap of white, which I knew was Penna, always just vanishing ahead. I was left with those two restless and malcontented shades, when all I’d wanted was to find the Dame and Na again so I should not go alone and friendless through this strange land.

 
  

 

  
I climbed the stairs to the little room I shared with Lychnais. My shoulders brushed the walls as I ascended. I followed the glimmer of Penna’s gauze kirtle, and when she vanished all light was gone and both my eyes were blind as a mole’s. I sat down on the stairs. Tonight, as soon as one way closed I’d seen another, seen it all at once in my mind’s eye, even to the door with the bar I could use as a lever, and the casting down of the waste jars. I’d dreamed it before I did it, but I’d hadn’t forseen the look Agminhatin would give me as she passed in the tunnel.

 

  
She knew I was tharais. What she knew, others would know. They would not be fooled by my claim that I knew the tunnels because I was a dowser. No tharos dowser would willingly enter there. The textrices would guess I worked in the bath as an attendant, and bar me from the refuge I’d found for them. Even if they let me in, someone would betray me tonight or tomorrow. Dulcis would, and gladly. I couldn’t risk being delivered to the arthygater’s tormentors to be branded or maimed.

 

  
I rubbed my wrist, thinking of Catena. Silently saying farewell to her, and begging the gods we both worshipped to look after her. She would be well, I told myself. It wasn’t her own fate that brought her here; she’d been shackled to my fate, and for that I was truly sorry, though it was none of my doing.

 

  
I refused to pray on my own behalf. The gods had misled me to this place, pulling me this way and that. Now their opposing wills were knotted so tightly around me that I couldn’t find one end or another of their purposes to untie myself. Yet I had no will of my own, I was sullen and heavy as clay.

 

  
I sat a long time unmoving in the dark, and my mind’s eye was dark as well. I couldn’t see two paces ahead, let alone a day or a year ahead, for I’d lost all foresight, not only the true foreknowledge sometimes granted by the gods, but mere imagination. And I lacked the courage to do the unimaginable.

 

  
I stood. Keeping one hand on the wall, I took a step down into the blankness and then another—surprising myself, for I hadn’t realized I’d decided to move. At the bottom of the stairs, I turned right and right again, venturing for the first time past the boar’s-head waterspout in the tunnel under the western side of the palace.

 

  
I sang under my breath the song Ardor had given me: the melody from the Smith, the words from Hearthkeeper.

 

  

 

  
Burn bright, burn fast.

 

  
Give what light you can,

 

  
the rest is ash.

 

  

 

  
Louder then, for the song itself gave me courage:
Burn bright, burn fast.
I saw the faintest glimmers from streaks and patches of salts left behind when the walls wept.
Give what light you can.
In my mouth, the taste of something bitter, something burnt:
The rest is ash.

 
  

 

  
The tunnel turned and branched, and I went right and left, forward and back, up and down stairs and slopes, and soon I lost all sense of where I was under the city. The bespeckled dark made me think of how I’d chased the wood-rover petals, and indeed I often followed the sound of water, water running beneath my feet or in clay pipes embedded in the walls. A long way underground I entered a drain tunnel with a raised path on one side. The drain was made to carry rainwater from the streets during the storms of winter; now it held a sluggish stream fed by water oozing from the rocks. I bathed my legs and scrubbed my wrapper, and afterward I was cold but smelled less vile. I followed the drain upstream, stooping so as not to scrape the roof.

 

  
Thin gray veils of light hung in the darkness before me, and I quickened my steps. I halted under a stone grate, and light touched my face like the softest silk. The grate was too heavy to lift, but I walked on until I found one made of iron, and I emerged into the street like a meneidon of the drain made restless by the drumming of masquers.

 

  
I looked down a deserted alley and saw where the hidden Sun dyed the Heavens with the fugitive colors of dawn, and once again I knew east from west. I hurried downhill toward the dawn, going where? Where Chance led me. Here in Lambanein they thought Fortune and Misfortune were two, but they were one in her, and Allaxios was hers until the end of twilight. I went toward what she would give me, or take from me.

 

  
Chance gave me a drunk, one of the Misfortune’s herd. At first I thought he was dead, because he lay crumpled against a wall with his head downhill. I leaned over him and heard him snort and snore under his horse skull mask.

 

  
I stripped him, rolling him out of the cloak twisted about him. The stilts were the height of my knee, carved of wood like pattens, and painted with red and white stripes. One stilt was loose, askew, so the leg looked broken. His mask was fastened to a reed helmet that buckled under the chin. The teeth and lower jaw of the horse skull had been removed, and the inside was padded to rest against a human face.

 

  
I donned the mask and stilts and cloak and struggled to stand by propping myself against the wall. My feet were too far away and the mask too heavy, and it was difficult to see through eye sockets that didn’t align with my own. I tottered along with one hand on the wall, thumping the stilts against the pavement emphatically. I was not a woman; I was a misfortune, a drunken misfortune returning home at the end of a long festival night. In my deepest, roughest voice, I sang the drinking song Mox had taught us in the mountains:

 

  

 

  
I, even I, must die,

 

  
So why should I bother to try?

 

  
It is better to die drinking,

 

  
Than to lie thinking,

 

  
That I, even I, must die.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 26
  

  
Court of Tranquil Waters
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
T
he king slept all morning and half the afternoon. They brought me to him after his bath. He was dressed in a loose robe of red wool patterned with gold thread, and his beard and hair shone with scented oil.

 

  
I prostrated myself on the tiled floor before him. I said I’d had to flee Arthygater Katharos’s palace, because the taskmistress of the napkins threatened to betray me despite the gold I’d given her. The Misfortune of the City had assaulted the palace, and in the uproar I’d escaped, and followed some masquers who spoke the High into the Inner Palace to the king’s door. I could not return to the arthygater’s palace ever again, or she’d put me to the question under torture and then take my head. I begged the king to have mercy, not to give me back to the arthygater or turn me out.

 

  
He said, “What am I to do with you?”

 
  

 

  
A woman doesn’t reside in men’s quarters in Lambanein, yet I did, for a hand of days, live in the Court of Tranquil Waters with what was left of the king’s army. Stagnant Waters, they should have called it, for the long pool in the courtyard was covered with green scum. The arkhon had granted King Corvus a most dilapidated residence, a two-story building about the size of the manufactory, with stables at one end of the courtyard and baths and kitchens at the other. On the two longest sides, behind colonnades, were rows of small rooms furnished with heaps of straw, broken chairs, and beds with torn cushions. The wall paintings had been splendid once.

 

  
It was strange to live among soldiers again, and to live barefaced after so long under the shawl. Everywhere I went, I was watched. I remembered how the gazes of men had burdened me when I’d first come to the Marchfield, but I was not the green girl I used to be. And the men didn’t see me as a mere skinsheath. They looked at me and saw the king’s dreamer. More than one varlet made plain his opinion that King Corvus had wronged me by sending me away.

 

  
I was fearful I would lose their regard if they learned I was tharais. Three
men had seen me in tharais garb: the king, Garrio, and Sire Vafra. What if Sire Vafra boasted that he’d seen me serving as a napkin, and had taken me to a retiring room? I need not have worried. Living together as they did in a hive of strange-ignorant ones, the king’s men had not learned how much it mattered. Blood and mud they understood, not tharos and tharais.

 

  
There were no proper women’s quarters, though there were women about; the arkhon had supplied his guest with bondwomen to cook and clean and launder, and there were women who visited of their own accord to ply a different trade. I approached a cook to buy a small sack of yellow powder for my arms, and prayed she wouldn’t smell the tharais taint, or notice how I shook at my own temerity.

 
  

 

  
I’d given myself to Hazard Chance in the last passage of the last night of the Quickening, and she had delivered me to the king as surely as if she’d clasped my hand and dragged me here herself. Now I was listless, without even a whim to give me reason to stir.

 

  
I passed the time sleeping, by night in the second-story colonnade, and by day in the courtyard on a bed of lemon-scented thyme. I covered myself in a blanket of shadow under a pomegranate tree. In the afternoon the shade would move away from me and I would lie in the Sun awhile, torpid as a snake, before creeping around the tree to another shadow. The shimmer of light through the leaves lulled me. I didn’t remember my dreams.

 

  
I ought to have been glad I’d left the arthygater’s palace. So many times I’d promised myself escape, envisioning a shining day in which I would break the dry husk of my bondwoman’s life to return home to Galan. I would traverse mountains to reach him; I would find my way, come summertime.

 

  
If I couldn’t go this year, it was no use trying.

 

  
How many days and nights of my exile had I tormented myself with jealousy, imagining Galan with a new sheath, a mudwoman like me, or a captive woman of the Blood, someone who could be an ornament to his rank? There was pain in it, and pleasure too; I tugged on the bond to make sure it was still taut between us, and that time and distance and the Initiates of Carnal had failed to sever it.

 

  
To think of Galan lying with another woman was to think of him alive. I couldn’t permit myself to consider that he might be dead.

 
  

 

  
Garrio thought I must be ill. He squatted beside me and put his hand on my forehead. “I don’t have a fever,” I said.

 

  
“No, you’re cold. What’s the matter?”

 

  
I sat up and put my arms around my legs and rested my chin on my
kneecaps, though it was improper in Lambanein for a woman to sit that way. “What will the king do with me, do you think?”

 

  
Garrio shrugged.

 

  
I said, “I don’t understand why he sent you to fetch me from the dyers when he had no use for me at all.”