Wildfire (50 page)

 

  
“Was he the girdsman?” I asked. It was difficult to tell Dulcis’s many suitors apart. She boasted endlessly of men who desired her, but I never saw a one. She boasted of her beauty, and I confess I never saw that either. It was true she had a double chin—which Lambaneish men found delectable, she said—and her skin was hardly wrinkled at all, considering her age. She’d been in the manufactory twenty years.

 

  
“Oh no, Diakonan was the porter,” Dulcis said. “The guardsman, oh my dear, I was content to let him mark me as he wished. You should have seen me after our couplings, all covered with bites and scratches! I think he gave me as many scars as he had himself. He was a bold fellow, very passionate, adept in the twenty-five Postures—a rod like oak! I swear when we did the vine and column, he could hold me up without using his hands.”

 

  
“However did he get in to see you?”

 

  
“He used the needle peddler as a go-between, and bribed the porter,” Dulcis said. “Only one key fits every lock, don’t you know that?”

 

  
“The same portal…porter? Diakoman?”

 

  
“Oh yes. It used to make him wild with jealousy.”

 

  
“This key you speak of—”

 

  
“Money.”

 

  
“Yes, money. Can it unlock the dorter so we can get out?”

 

  
Nitida said, “You could never lay hands on enough coin for that. The arthygater doesn’t mind if men sneak in from time to time to beget more bondservants, but any porter who let a woman run away—well, I daresay he’d lose his life in an unpleasant fashion. She’d probably have her tormentors skin him alive.”

 
  

 

  
The timekeepers rattled wooden clappers to mark the seven passages of the day and the three passages of the night, that we might rise, work, eat, and sleep at the proper times. Every day I sat weaving from daybreak to sunset. The loom was upright rather than level, and the warp was kept taut with weights, but aside from such peculiarities I was reminded of the Dame’s workshop: the same rhythmic thump of beaters and swish of shuttles between warp threads, and the sound of women’s voices. There were a dozen weavers in the room, and many such rooms around the manufactory courtyard.

 

  
I wove yellow cloth with a broad brown stripe down the middle:
tharais,
it was called. Every day I was supposed to weave a cloth twice the length of my outstretched arms, of which a third was used for a shawl and the rest for a wrapper. We were able to weave quickly because somewhere, in another room, textrices warped our looms and wove starting bands of black and white checks.

 

  
These tharais garments were coarse as sacking, of lumpy nettle thread dyed with onionskins and walnut hulls. Dulcis said they were for the lowliest servants of Arthygater Katharos, the kind who went about hidden under the shawl, like the woman who had shaved us in the bathhouse. Textrices wore tharais cloths only during their tides, when they were obliged to cover their faces and eat and sleep in seclusion. The rest of the time we wore finer
tharos
cloth, wool dyed yellow with weld, with the same checked starting bands that marked all the arthygater’s servants.

 

  
Our taskmistress scolded and slapped us if we were too slow, and spit the word
tharais
at us as if it were a curse. I came to think the word meant something poorly made, or rather something not worth the trouble of making well, since she never punished us for slovenly work.

 

  
I’d always heard it said that Artifex traveled around the world and made people from the clay of different riverbanks, so that each kind of folk was a different color. In that weaving room was proof. There were bondwomen from kingdoms I’d never heard of; some had wan skin, others were red cheeked, and some ruddy brown. Most of the Lambaneish women were buff in color and tended to freckle, like me, and at first I was taken for one of them, newly arrived from the provinces. They greeted me and spoke in a friendly way, but as soon as I opened my mouth, they knew I was a foreigner. After that only a few bothered to try talking to me, but they conversed freely among themselves, and their talk was a river in which I fished for meaning. I learned words for nettle, hemp, linen, wool, shuttle, warp, loom, barley, chickpeas, olives. Things I could point to or touch: sky, tree, fountain, roof, floor, column, hair, hand, foot, garment, bead, lash. The music of the language came more easily to me than the words, or rather came back to me—the high, singing intonations of the women’s speech, so different from the rough growl affected by the men.

 

  
One weaver had a small boy too young to be taken from her and sent to the men’s quarters. The boy pulled bobbins of thread out of his mother’s basket and tangled them up, and she yanked his hair for it. He wailed,
“Emmin! Emmin!”
Mother! Mother! I recognized the word by the pain it gave me the first time I heard it.
Fedan, emmin
; father, mother.

 

  
Now and then I fished up such little words, words I didn’t know I knew, minnows caught in a net dragged through dark waters.

 
  

 

  
In the underground dormitory we High speakers claimed our usual place by a certain stout, whitewashed pillar, and spread our thin blankets over a heap of straw, and used our wool wrappers and shawls as coverlets. Catena and I lay side by side to share warmth, as many women did, and I told her one of Na’s old stories about the hunter and the hare-woman. Now that we were safe from the wild Ferinus, she enjoyed being frightened. Her hair had grown from fuzz to fur; I ran my hand through the soft bristles and wondered if she would want to leave with me, to cross the mountains again.

 

  
Catena slept. The only light in the dormitory seeped from two shuttered lanterns, one near the door and the other across the room by the privy bench, and their faint flicker made the ceiling loom even closer. A woman was coughing somewhere in the room, a dry hoarse cough, a sound as hard for me to ignore as the cry of a baby. I had a quarrel with myself, thinking I had no herbs, and couldn’t speak her language, and it wasn’t my place to care for her—I had no place here, I didn’t belong. But I found it impossible to do nothing. I stepped carefully between the sleepers to the water jar to fetch the woman a cup of water. She lay curled up on her side in the busiest and foulest corner of the dormitory, near the long bench with holes where we relieved ourselves all in a row, sitting over hidden night-soil jars. Newcomers slept here if they were unable to claim a better place on the crowded dormitory floor.

 

  
I crouched beside the woman. Perhaps she thought I was going to reprimand her for making noise, for she cringed away from me. “Water?” I said in Lambaneish. She sat up and gave a timid smile, and took the cup I offered. She too had been recently shorn. I put my hand on her bony back and forehead, and found her hearthfire was burning steadily. Just a cold, nothing more, but her throat was so raw from coughing that every breath scratched and made her cough some more. She squeezed my hand in thanks, which shamed me, for I hadn’t helped.

 

  
I went back to bed and listened to her cough.

 

  
When at last I fell asleep, I dreamed of walking on the steep slopes above the stone house on Mount Sair. The Maid had come to the high meadows and the Athlewood, bringing a wild sweet fragrance. I gathered mint and mustard and nettles, and went down to my herb garden on the terrace below the house to pick horehound and hyssop. Everything I needed to ease a cough.

 

  
Maybe I smelled the musk of horehound and the bracing scent of mint in my sleep, for in the morning I awoke to find those herbs in the straw around our blankets, mixed with poppies and cornflower and other weeds
that had grown unwelcomed amidst wheat and barley. I knew a gift when I saw one, but after the bounty of the dream it seemed a chastening, the gods obliging me to be grateful for small favors. I murmured a prayer, but my heart was grudging.

 

  
I raked up a heap of straw and began to sort through it, setting aside useful plants—those I’d found in my dream and more—and Catena helped me bundle them and hang them from the low rafters with twists of thread. Some of the goodness had faded from the herbs, but even so they carried the scent of other places and other seasons.

 

  
I made a tisane of horehound and hyssop the next night, when I heard the woman coughing, and in this way I took up my duties as a greenwoman again. I was amazed by how quickly this became known, and how many came to me. Many textrices had been hoarding small complaints for lack of any remedy. A few were quite ill, and they’d hidden their misery lest they be sent to a temple to die, for the arthygater had no tolerance for bondwomen who couldn’t work.

 

  
There were certain peculiar Lambaneish illnesses caused by angry spirits they called
meneidon.
Most of these meneidon were water wights dwelling in streams, fountains, cisterns, and drains; others dwelt in stone or wood. Our courtyard fountain had a meneidon, and there were said to be several others lurking in the manufactory who were quick to take offense and hard to placate. They sometimes afflicted people with fits or staggers or palsies for transgressions such as emptying a bucket of foul water in the wrong place. The only true cure for such illnesses was to appease the irate meneidon, but at times I was able to ease a woman’s suffering.

 

  
I learned new words in Lambaneish, belly, womb, tooth, pain. Nitida or Migra would translate when gestures failed. I used what I could find: sage or meadowsweet in the bedstraw, germander and thyme growing between the stones of the courtyard. Sometimes I was deprived of any hope of helping, for what I needed grew outside the manufactory walls. Then I was sore resentful to be barred from the realm of all that was green and growing, and from the coming of spring out in the wide world.

 

  
Often I turned to the Dame and Na, throwing the bones in the dark dormitory, surrounded by sleepers. It was such a comfort that they tarried with me. Comfort too is a healing gift. Perhaps I had to be humbled to learn that; I had to be reminded to accept with grace those times when nothing could be done but to let the sufferer know she wasn’t alone.

 
  

 

  
Every evening Dulcis burned wisps of wool before her little clay figure of Wend Ram, but she also gave obeisance to the gods of Lambanein, espe
cially the goddess Katabaton. Of true gods the Lambaneish acknowledged only three: the husband-father Posison, the wife-mother Katabaton, and the son Peranon. Such was my ignorance at the time that I was amazed to learn people worshipped other gods than ours. I asked Dulcis how there could be room for them, when our twelve gods divided creation between them, the visible and invisible realms.

 

  
“They live in the overworld,” Dulcis said.

 

  
“And where is that?”

 

  
“Where they hold court. It’s day there when it’s night here, and night when day, and their summer is our winter, and so forth.”

 

  
“So they are backward?”

 

  
“No, it’s said we are the backward ones, here in the underworld—backward like a reflection in a mirror.”

 

  
Nitida, who had bright black eyes, a deep laugh, and the most amiable nature of all the women from Incus, was not in the least devout, and she found my incredulity amusing. “They think our avatars are meneidon, you see—though of course very high-ranking ones. They have meneidon from many kingdoms in their service, just as the arkhon has his Ebanakan guards and diviners from Bivium.”

 

  
“But what of the Sun and the…Fool, I mean Moon?”

 

  
“What of them?” said Nitida.

 

  
“Well, anyone can see they are goods. The Sun—we see her every day, and she gives us life…light to see by—how could anyone deny her worship? It doesn’t make sense.”

 

  
Nitida laughed. “Who says the Lambaneish are sensible? They think the Sun is a wheeled cart driven by Posison, and the Moon is a ship in which Katabaton sails across the night.”

 

  
“You believe in Crutch Moon, don’t you, Dulcis?” I asked.

 

  
“Of course.”

 

  
“Then how can you believe in this Kata—Katabatabon sailing him about?”

 

  
Dulcis shrugged. She seemed to have no difficulty believing contradictions.

 

  
I found these Lambaneish notions absurd, and most absurd of all their belief that three deities could encompass the greatness of the world and govern its myriad parts. And I was affronted that they took our avatars for mere meneidon, no greater than the capricious spirit in the courtyard fountain. I knew the gods were gods. Hadn’t I felt the power of Ardor Wildfire impressed upon my body, and seen signs of the twelve gods manifest here in Lambanein, as everywhere?

 
  

 

  
In the Dame’s service I’d never been more than a fair weaver, for my mind was forever wandering outside and wishing the rest of me could follow—but it seemed a waste of time to do things downright badly, as the other weavers of tharais cloth were content to do. And the Dame did not approve of shoddy work. She was with me in the weaving room—in memory always, and in the skill of my hands. I wove to please her, not the arthygater.

 

  
When I proved both neat and quick, the taskmistress sent me to another weaving room, where we made tharos wrappers and shawls such as we textrices wore, only of finer quality. The cloth was sold in Allaxios or shipped elsewhere. It was the custom in Lambanein for women to wear yellow, with perhaps a patterned or striped border as decoration (respectable women wore stripes here, not just whores). But the Lambaneish didn’t have a single word for yellow, they had eleven, for all the colors they saw between yellow and orange. They could reckon a woman’s wealth to a nicety by the dye and thread used in her wrapper, the very finest being of silk colored with saffron.

 

  
In this weaving room I came under the flail of a short and short-tempered redhead named Zostra, who stalked about like a hen, thrusting her head forward. The loose wattle of flesh under her chin shook when she upbraided me, which she often did. If my attention flagged and I pulled the weft too tight, or if I stared at a thrush singing in the pear tree outside the windows, she’d strike my back with her lash of stout cords tipped with wooden beads. Or she would pinch me with her fingernails, which she kept long and sharp to prove she never had to weave or spin like the rest of us. I learned Lambaneish insults meaning slattern, sloven, idler, lackwit. Once I pulled down my woolen sock, which was all I had for shoes, to scratch the bottom of my foot, and Zostra flailed at me and shouted, “Tharais! Tharais!” In this way I learned the sole of the foot should be hidden.