Wildfire (51 page)

 

  
The Lambaneish found foreigners such as myself very rude and contemptible; even their word for us was an accusation, meaning strange-ignorant person. But I’d learned a few words and enough Lambaneish manners to avoid offending; I no longer showed my teeth when I smiled and laughed, or touched anyone with my left hand. Some of the women talked to me, such as red-haired Agminhatin, the best weaver in the room. She used to imitate Zostra’s mincing, pecking walk behind her back, and make us laugh.

 

  
It took me a long time to patch together a question in Lambaneish—and once I’d asked, the answer usually baffled me. The words came too fast, so I watched people closely when they spoke, reckoning what they meant from expressions and gestures, inflections and pauses, just as I had after being struck by Wildfire. Then I’d puzzle out their words—only to find, often as
not, they didn’t mean what they said. Everyone hated Zostra, and showed it plainly; but as their contempt wore the guise of servility, and their taunts took the form of flatteries, she didn’t appear to notice.

 

  
Days that are all the same pass slowly. By twilight there were tight bands of pain across my neck and shoulders, cramps in my legs, and aches from my fingers to my forearms. Usually hard work inured me to more hard work, but the aches worsened. My thoughts seemed as bound to one task as my body, and suffered as much from repetition, back and forth like the shuttle, but with no cloth to show for it at the end of the day: Galan and King Corvus, longing and bitterness, two ply of a thread so twisted that sometimes I confused the one I desired with the one who had abandoned me.

 
  

 

  
During dark-of-the-Moon the Lambaneish women were full of dread, and they began each night by marching around the dormitory hallooing and clapping to drive away malicious thoughts and spirits. Tomorrow was the New Moon festival, and they would greet the Moon’s appearance with fervent celebration, as proof Katabaton’s ship had not foundered in the seas of night. It would be the first day of rest since we’d come to the manufactory—the only such day each month, for the Lambaneish didn’t have a Peaceday at the end of every tennight.

 

  
When the dormitory was quiet at last, I sat up and cleared a space in the straw to spread out the cloth compass. I did this almost every night now, after the other women had gone to sleep, hunching naked under a shawl with the divining compass hidden between my knees, casting the bones. When I was not seeking remedies for someone else, I had my own reasons to call on the Dame and Na, asking what had become of Galan and Mai and all my other friends. What of Mouse? What of Garrio and the horseboys, how did they fare?

 

  
I asked the bones about King Corvus, and they answered in riddles. I’d served him unwillingly but well—he couldn’t deny I’d served him well, and daily I had expected he would send for me. Didn’t he need a seer in this strange country? But after more than two tennights in the manufactory, I no longer believed a summons would come. I began to think he’d sold us to Arthygater Katharos. Many bondwomen here had been taken captive in wars or raids, like us, or sold by their families, like Migra, whose wastrel husband used her to pay a gambling debt.

 

  
It wasn’t that I was loyal to the king. But I was sure he would try to retake Incus, and when he crossed the Ferinus this summer, I wanted to go with him. Dame Abeo told me the passes through the mountains opened about Midsummer Day; when the Maid ripens into summer elsewhere, it’s still spring among the peaks. I’d asked Dame Abeo many questions about
Sapheiros, for her family had settled there after King Voltur’s conquest, taking possession of one of the fine estates the Lambaneish nobles had lost. She’d been captured in a raid across the border, and seen her father killed—had things done to her of which she wouldn’t speak. One learned not to ask. There were many terrible stories, and worse fates than mine. I found this truth to be a poor consolation.

 

  
I lay down to sleep, and the straw I’d heaped up under the blanket rustled as I turned and turned again. It smelled of summer fields and a dusty harvest, and oh, how could I wait that long? When the pear tree bloomed in the courtyard, I would leave, I told myself, though the bones warned me not to be ruled by my impatience.

 
  

 

  
I dreamed false dreams of the king. Bad dreams, lost and freezing and starving again in the Ferinus, and the king asking something of me with a hope I found more painful than his despair, because I had nothing to give.

 

  
I dreamed fragrant true dreams of the house on Mount Sair, but Galan never visited these dreams as he had in the temple of Lynx. I dreamed I worked harder than in the weaving room, hauling rocks and water and hay, digging, planting, and pruning. I awoke rested, my limbs warm and stretched and relaxed after those exertions, eased of the cramps I felt after a day at the loom.

 

  
More and more I was afraid I would never live to see that house on the mountain. I’d taken these true dreams as a promise of what would be, when perhaps they merely promised what might have been.

 

  
How lucky I was those days I forgot to miss Galan. Because it couldn’t be borne every day.

 
  

 

  
I sat with the women from Incus in the courtyard arcade. The winter rains had stopped over a tennight ago, and it wouldn’t rain again for half a year—so they said, though I found it hard to believe. Above the green-tiled roof, the sky was a pure deep blue. A few stars glittered like beads between the fretwork branches of the pear tree. Catena was playing with friends, as she did most evenings; already she could make herself understood in Lambaneish better than Migra, who had been here eight years.

 

  
For several nights Dame Abeo had been teaching me to read again, and for text we had the scrip Sire Galan had given me. At first I could pick out only my name. But Ardor had been merciful to me of late. I still hesitated and misspoke from time to time, but it was no hindrance to being understood, and my friends from Incus hardly seemed to notice. It was the same with reading. Sign and sound and sense had once seemed walled off from one another, a maze in which I was baffled at every turn. Now the walls
tumbled down, and I was free to learn and remember. The godsigns made sounds, the sounds made words, and the words made sense:
Bear witness that I give my sheath Firethorn tenancy, for her lifetime, of my holding that lies on Mount Sair and is bounded by the Needle Cliffs to the north, Wend River to the east and south, and to the west the Athlewood; the stone house and byres, the lands, and rights to coppice, pasture, and spring.

 

  
Dame Abeo praised me for learning quickly, and Nitida wanted to know all about this Sire Galan, what he looked like and why I hadn’t gone to the house he’d given me. I’d been reticent to speak of him before, and now perhaps I spoke too freely and made too much of his handsomeness and bravery. Nitida teased me for it, and it was sweet, I must admit, to let the other women know such a man had been fond of me.

 

  
Dulcis boasted about the bravery of some nobleman who had adored her many years ago, turning the conversation toward the more interesting subject of herself. By now I too had learned to ignore her tales while pretending to listen.

 
  

 

  
In my third tennight in the manufactory, as I lay sleeping, someone cut the drawstring of the divining compass that hung from the red cord around my waist, and took the pouch and everything in it, my tin amulet of Wildfire, the folded linen scrip from Galan, and the finger bones of the Dame and Na. The thief also cut pewter beadcoins from my net cap.

 

  
I discovered this in the morning, and Catena and Dulcis and the others helped me search, sifting through the straw around our sleeping place. I raised an outcry, asking everyone I knew if they had noticed a thief. Agminhatin, the redheaded weaver from Zostra’s weaving room, took offense as if I’d accused her; others shrugged, indifferent. I risked a beating to stay behind in the dormitory and shake out every one of the blankets folded on shelves along the wall. I prayed the thief would take the coins and leave the rest, but I couldn’t find a scrap of cloth or a bone.

 

  
That night Dulcis said a dung beetle must have taken it. She said everyone knew they trained their children as thieves, and sent them to climb up through the holes in privy benches to steal from respectable people. Migra agreed, saying the
koprophagais
were up to all kinds of mischief: thefts, ravishments, causing maladies by pollutions, and spying at bathers through peepholes. I didn’t know who or what these dung beetles might be, but I was sure one of the other bondwomen had stolen my pouch. I suspected everyone except Catena. I was furious to think of Galan’s promise and the precious bones, worthless to anyone else, tossed into a shit jar—or worse yet, to think of the Dame and Na bound unwillingly to a thief who fancied
a new talisman. I had been careless; someone must have seen me late at night, casting the bones for myself or for a healing.

 

  
It was hard to lose that pleated, knotted strip of linen on which was written Galan’s bequest. But it was worse to lose the bones and their counsel. When a weaver came to me with a mysterious malady—red lumps on her legs, shortness of breath, a feeling of oppression in her chest, frailty—I was unable to help. I still had the gift in my hands and the knowledge of greenlore restored to me, but without the bones to show me which avatars governed the matter, and where to look for a remedy, I was at a loss. I yearned for the divination and interpretation, the way the signs sometimes formed lock and key, and questions unlocked answers, or pointed to patterns altogether unexpected in which I sensed the mysterious motives of the gods themselves.

 

  
But most of all I was bereft of the ones who cared for me, their presence, their touch. I grieved for the Dame and Na as if they were newly dead.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 20
  

  
Tharais
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
I
t was my own fault I became tharais. I thought tharais and tharos referred to kinds of cloth, but they are entire domains, which are unknown in Incus and Corymb, and have no names in the High or the Low. Unclean and clean, impure and pure, valuable and worthless make a beginning. Yet many useful parts, things, and people are tharais, such as the left hand, the soles of one’s feet, uncooked meat, and dyers—useful, but tharais, therefore tainted.

 

  
Before the bones were stolen, the Dame had sustained me through many a tedious day at the loom. Sometimes I had felt her nearby, and heard her humming a song to Wend Weaver, whom she’d loved best of all avatars, and I was granted a morning or an afternoon when the shuttle flew back and forth and the threads were laid down like lines of light, never too taut or too loose. On such days Zostra had paused to watch, and moved on without using her flail.

 

  
Zostra trusted me with finer thread now, made of molted wool from gelded sheep, almost as costly as silk. But weaving was a dull duty without the presence of the Dame. I was tempted to commit small ruinations, to tangle the weft into knots and break warp threads—but it wouldn’t have satisfied, and Zostra would have struck me and made me pick it out again.

 

  
One morning I was working to match a striped border on an old scrap of cloth, and I ran out of a color and asked Zostra for more. She gave me thread dyed with madder, when I had been weaving thread dyed with kermes, a more expensive dye and a richer crimson. They had seven names for shades of red and I knew them all, and I insisted the color was inferior, using gestures when I ran out of words. Had she sold the kermes thread and bought madder and kept the difference? By small cheats small fortunes could be made in the manufactory.

 

  
Zostra struck me on the top of my head with her flail, shouting at me for making such a foolish mistake. When she raised the whip to hit me again, I caught the cords in my hand. She tugged and I tugged back, and I yanked the
flail away from her and threw it down and ground it under my heel—I took my shoe-stocking off to do so, using the sole of my foot to taint the whip so she wouldn’t dare pick it up. To do this was a sweet balm for everything that galled me. I knew I’d get a beating, maybe a bad one, and for the moment I didn’t care.

 

  
She flew at me, shrieking that I was a filthy filthy stinking tharais! She pulled off my net cap and yanked at my hair, and struck me about the face and head. There was such a fine furious hatred singing all through me that I hit her back, slapped her cheek so hard it stung my palm. She went for my eyes with her sharpened fingernails, and I hit her again, with my fists this time. I tried to knock her down so I could trample her as I’d trampled her whip. She fled from me, out the door and down the hall.

 

  
I touched my brow and found that Zostra had drawn blood. The other weavers gawped. Agminhatin was always quick with a jest; she clucked like a frantic hen and flapped her elbows, imitating Zostra running away. No one laughed but Agminhatin herself.

 

  
Now that it was too late, I was sick with misgivings. I’d heard too many tales of the arthygater’s tormentors and how they marked bondservants who disobeyed, to serve as living examples of the cost of her disfavor.

 
  

 

  
Zostra returned with two male guards and they marched me out of the manufactory and across a courtyard into another building, where I was presented for judgment to a stout woman named Gnathin, who had an air of fuss and bustle. She was swathed in a wrapper of saffron silk, and the long cords on her net cap were strung end to end with gold and carnelian beadcoins.

 

  
Though Zostra was a great power in her own tiny realm, she answered to greater powers. She made her complaint to the stout woman in a shrill voice, speaking of kermes and madder, and gesturing to show how I’d struck at her. Gnathin seemed peeved to be taken from more important duties; she reprimanded Zostra for letting an inferior get the better of her. Then she uttered a few words, and raised a few fingers on her left hand.