Wildfire (52 page)

 

  
Zostra turned to me with a look of malicious satisfaction. She spat on the ground and said, “Tharais!”

 

  
In the kitchen court of the arthygater’s palace Zostra made me undress. My new garments were the kind I’d woven when I first arrived: coarse nettle cloth, dyed onionskin yellow with a brown stripe. The wrapper went about me once instead of twice, and opened a little in back as I walked. I draped the shawl over my head, for I was forbidden hereafter to show my face to tharos people. The dark stripe made it easier to see through the cloth.

 

  
I wasn’t permitted to say farewell to Catena. I feared I’d never see her again, or find my stolen bones and the deed to the house on the mountain, for I was barred from the manufactory.

 

  
I was tharais now.

 
  

 

  
It was, perhaps, Gnathin’s little jest to send me to work in a dyehouse where they used the madder dye of which I had complained. The sole product of the dyehouse was scarlet wool, which was sold by Arthygater Katharos to the arkhon so that his Ebanakan guardsmen could go clad in identical tunics and breeches.

 

  
Dyeing cloth was a stinking business, and therefore tharais. I was banished to the tharais district of Allaxios, where the impure lived and worked: besides the dyers, there were butchers, tanners, and fullers who cleaned and felted wool. There were embalmers—a profession unknown to me before—who buried the dead in quicklime to strip away the flesh, and made plaster statues with the bones inside that were kept in crypts under the city.

 

  
And then there were dung beetles, the koprophagais, who scuttled about in gooseshit brown shawls and were despised even by other tharais. The koprophagais trafficked in excrement. They sold dung of all kinds to be spread on the fields; they sold urine to dyers for use as mordants, according to complicated recipes, such as the one that called for the piss of drunkards during a full Moon. Which explained why, in the dormitory, we had been obliged to piss through one row of holes in the bench and shit through another; the arthygater profited even from our wastes. I learned these things and more.

 

  
I didn’t know enough of Lambanein then to understand the severity of my punishment. And I’d gained something by my exile: a larger portion of the Heavens, a greater share in the coming of spring. Glad Growan Maid came earlier to Allaxios than to the Kingswood, and already she unfurled her bright green banners in every garden. Our dyehouse was in a walled compound on a terrace just above the river, and if I climbed to the third limb of the candlebark tree, I could see over the wall. A green haze was spreading all along the Ouraios River and west across the plains to a solitary snow-covered peak. I’d never seen a candlebark tree before coming to Lambanein, but I recognized it at once from the fragrance of its rusty bark, which we burned at night to keep away the stenches.

 
  

 

  
Nasthai was my new taskmaster, and he was a lean, stooped, sallow man, who shouted when he spoke to me as if that would improve my understanding. He’d worked in the dyehouse his whole life and his father before him. He and his wife and two sons lived in a loft above the workshop,
beside the locked room where bales of cloth and casks of madder were stored. The rest of us—the woman Knotais, Kenoabantapas, and I—slept downstairs among the vats, or in the courtyard if it was warm enough.

 

  
I found the dyers unfriendly at first. They thought me too proud. I might have been tharos once, and a textrix living in the arthygater’s palace, but I was tharais now, like themselves and no better, even if I’d not been born that way. People did not climb back up once they’d been cast down. I repeatedly made the mistake of using the tharos word for
I
, instead of saying “this one” or “it,” as tharais were obliged to do. Nasthai’s wife, Mazais, pinched my lips shut with her sharp fingernails to teach me not to do that again. She said, “A little child knows better than you.”

 

  
In the Dame’s household I had preferred the art of dyeing to weaving. I had a knack for the greenlore, and for bringing pure colors out of muddy dyebaths. I never imagined it could be as tedious as it was in the dyehouse. A new shipment of madder root had just come in, a wagon full of it, and day after long day we sorted and pounded the roots, making pastes we spread upon planks to dry and then ground into a fine powder. We used only powder from the bright inner core of the best roots, and the rest was resold. I was wrong about the inferiority of madder: they had a way of preparing the wool over many days with various baths before they dyed it, to produce a red brighter and more colorfast than we had achieved in the Dame’s household. Nasthai kept some of the steps secret, and I never learned the whole recipe.

 

  
The dyers had lived all their lives in the tharais district of Allaxios, save Kenoabantapas, a man with skin the color of a walnut and just as wrinkled. He’d been a long time in Lambanein, but he spoke the language with peculiar intonations. He was Ebanakan, from the same kingdom as the men of Arkhon Kyphos’s personal guard, for whom we dyed cloth. He’d been a sailor—a pirate, Knotais whispered—before he was taken captive. He kept a caged bird, some sort of starling, which spoke in proverbs. “Kiss a thief and count teeth,” it would say. Kenoabantapas had lost a good many teeth, and I asked him if he had kissed many thieves. He said, “Only one thief, but many kisses,” and laughed heartily, showing his gums, and I joined in. The sound of my own laughter startled me, and when tears welled up I blinked them back.

 

  
Spring was too sweet, it made me melancholy, it troubled me with the balmy airs of evening, and fat buds opening fans of silver-green leaves on the candlebark tree. Even the sound of a woman sweeping in another compound could pierce me with longing, knock a small chink in the wall I’d built between this present life, which did not belong to me and yet must be endured, and the life I hoped to take up again as if I’d never left it.

 

  
I had promised myself I would leave Allaxios when the pear tree bloomed in the manufactory courtyard, and surely the first blossoms were open. But it was not yet spring in the Ferinus. I must wait for the thaw, bide my time until the passes opened in midsummer. Suppose I succeeded in crossing the mountains, and reached Malleus to find the army of Corymb had already returned home? Then I’d have to make my way alone across Incus and the Inward Sea, across Corymb to the city of Ramus or to the keep of Galan’s father. To what welcome? To learn that Galan had taken another sheath, thinking I had died or run away?

 

  
I must forbid myself such thoughts; I must think of how it could be done rather than how it was impossible.

 
  

 

  
Nasthai began to entrust me with chores that took me outside the compound, such as fetching mountain water from the fountain of Nephron, a duty I shared with the bondwoman Knotais. We carried the water in clay vessels, which were heavy even when empty. Each jar had a narrow waist and round hips and a small foot, and two handles like arms akimbo. A full jar was carried upright on the head, and looked to me like a little clay woman standing atop a real woman. I tried my best to imitate the gliding walk and straight backs of the women of Lambanein, but I hadn’t their knack of balancing the jar without using hands.

 

  
It took many trips to the fountain to fill the huge vat for the mordant bath that readied the wool to take and hold color. There was water close at hand—rainwater in cisterns under the courtyard, or the spring in the fountain house we used for drinking water, or the river itself—but for mordanting Nasthai insisted on the pure mountain water that flowed all the way from the Ferinus on a stone causeway. Upstream from the dyehouse, the aqueduct crossed the river on stone arches, bringing the water to the Inner Palace itself, high on the precipice. The arkhon permitted this bounty to flow lavishly to the rest of the city, down from his gates and past the palaces of his nobles to the fine residences of the upper town and the crowded streets of the lower town. Even the tharais district received a share, by way of the enormous bronze sow named Nephron, whose teats spurted mountain water into a pool. She stood near the upper tharais gate, two terraces above the dyehouse.

 

  
One day Knotais and I hoisted the empty water jars on to our shoulders to go to the fountain. We climbed steep stairs in the crumbling wall of a terrace, looking up always toward the marble walls and golden roofs of the Inner Palace, on the summit of the mount. I was delighted to be let out of the dyehouse, but our task was hard on Knotais. At least when we went uphill to the fountain, the jars were empty. She limped because one leg
couldn’t straighten at the knee—an accident of birth, she said. And she was carrying the burden of a child in her belly, at least six months along. I knew who had given her the big belly, everyone did. It was Chelai, the taskmaster’s son, who ignored Knotais these days, when he wasn’t rude to her. I’d made her an ointment to ease the ache from her limp, and sometimes at night I rubbed her legs with my warm hand so she could fall asleep. In a mostly wordless way we had become companionable.

 

  
At the fountain we stole time from our duties, sitting on the broad rim of Nephron’s pool to watch people come and go. I breathed deeply. The air was fresher up here, above the tanneries and dyehouses. I tossed dried maythen blossoms into the water. Nephron was benevolent, unless you offended her by spitting in her vicinity, but she expected tribute.

 

  
Now that I could no longer retreat in the evenings to the comfort of a known tongue, I spoke Lambaneish all the time, and perforce I learned faster. There were even times I found myself thinking in that language. But my understanding still outpaced my command of words. I took a palmful of water and let it run through my fingers, and said to Knotais, “Do you go to Ferinus, to Kerastes, where this water comes at?”

 

  
She shook her head. No. That gesture was the same wherever I had been.

 

  
I rumpled up my skirts in my lap and walked my fingers over the folds. “I, it, this one, walks on Kerastes this winter.” I hugged myself and pretended to shiver. “It makes cold.”

 

  
“You came from Incus in the winter?” She looked sidelong at me, no doubt wondering whether I was a liar.

 

  
I nodded.

 

  
“Why?” she asked.

 

  
“Why what?”

 

  
“Why from Incus in the winter?”

 

  
“Oh—a big fight.” I made two fists and butted them together. “King Corvus and his mother, they fight, and King Corvus runs.” The fingers of my right hand crossed the folds of cloth again.

 

  
“A big fight—you mean a war, ein?”

 

  
“A war, yes.” But I could see that war in Incus was too far away to matter. Knotais was silent, her head averted; she wrapped her arms over her belly and rocked a little. Was she weeping?

 

  
I put my arm around her. “What?” I asked. “What trouble?”

 

  
She leaned into me and sobbed. “Chelai is going to marry, they say—Hamadrai’s daughter, have you heard? No one but a koprophagais will ever marry this one!”

 

  
“Because your leg?”

 

  
“Because they say this one’s father was a koprophagais. He wasn’t
though. It’s a lie!” The words seemed to spray out of her. “And Chelai says when his wife comes to stay, if this one offends her they’ll marry it to a shit-eating dung beetle. But it won’t marry one, it won’t!”

 

  
I held Knotais’s hand with my cold right hand, and thought: at least you’ll have your child. And felt the sting of tears again.

 

  
I swear something pinched my earlobe hard, just for a moment, the way Na used to do when she was vexed with me, and my hair stood on end. And someone hissed in my ear that I shouldn’t be such a miser, keeping all my pity for myself. I was properly chastised—and glad too, so that I smiled even as the tears spilled over, to think Na had come all this way just to chide me. She could be such a scold.

 
  

 

  
During the long and complicated processes of dyeing the wool, there were sometimes unexpected gifts of a morning or an afternoon when I wasn’t required at the dyehouse. Then Mazais might send me to the tharais market on an errand, and not scold too much when I tarried. At first I marveled that I was given such liberty, remembering the tharos bondwomen pent up in the manufactory with but a single scrap of sky. But soon I got used to it, and took liberties I had not been granted, making my way to the riverbank below the terrace walls to harvest wild plants in the marshes and water meadows, mudflats and thickets. I seldom saw another person there, except in boats. The inhabitants of the city turned their backs on the river, and even those whose livelihoods depended on its free-flowing waters did not wander the banks by choice. The Ouraios River had a powerful meneidon, and furthermore, Mazais said, it was the path the dead took away from the city. She said that sometimes shades wandered back upstream, and climbed through drains to emerge in the streets. If so they did not trouble me, the Lambaneish dead.

 

  
I found fat pintle shoots poking through dead leaves, fiddleheads in bracken beds, and lily bulbs. I sold these delicacies in the little market square next to the street of the fullers, or shared them with the other dyers. I made Knotais special dishes and tonics: dandelion and chicory salads, infusions of feverfew to raise her spirits.

 

  
I also gathered silk grass, hemp, and yellow osier bark to twine and plait myself a carry sack, decorating it with red thread Mazais gave me after I made a lotion of marsh mallow roots to soothe her sore hands. A woman at the market admired this sack, so I made others to sell, staying up late in the courtyard, sitting with my back against the trunk of the candlebark tree.

 

  
The beadcoins I earned this way were all my own, money for my journey. I counted and recounted them and hung them on the cord fringe of my net cap so they would click and swish as I walked. They were pewter