Wildfire (53 page)

beads mostly, with a couple made of copper, and not worth much. It seemed odd to walk around the city with my coins showing in this way, instead of hidden in a purse, and indeed, Knotais told me to beware of thieves, especially little children.

 

  
I was still a bondwoman, but it seemed I’d find it easy enough to slip away when it was time. That wasn’t why I waited. The king had forgotten me; I’d get no help from him. And I was unwilling—afraid—to wander Lambanein and the mountains by myself, living on what I could scavenge or steal from farmers. I must have a guide and provisions. Perhaps I could join some traders, and make myself useful as a forager and cook.

 

  
I couldn’t hoard food from our allotments. Mazais boiled the barley and beans into pottages with onions, uncounted onions; a woman got three ladles of pottage for every five that went to a man. The tharos wouldn’t eat onions, saying they gave a body an unclean smell, and they insulted tharais by calling them onion-eaters. Now I understood why.

 

  
But here in the tharais district we hardly ever saw a tharos person; all the insults were aimed at each other. Onion-eater had less of a sting. Though Chelai could make Knotais cry whenever he wished by calling her a dung beetle.

 

  
I counted myself better off here than in the manufactory, and I wouldn’t have minded my banishment if not for Catena. But I comforted myself with the thought that Nitida and the others would look after her. She probably didn’t miss me at all.

 
  

 

  
I’d been in the dyehouse sixteen days when Garrio came to the gate. It was late morning, and we were in the bright sunlight in the courtyard, culling withered and rotten madder roots so they could be sold to dyers who didn’t have to satisfy the exacting requirements of Arthygater Katharos’s factor. We were without shawls, and the dyers held their hands before their faces so as not to pollute the gaze of a tharos. I sprang to my feet and ran to Garrio, and we embraced, and he gave me a kiss of peace on my forehead such as a father might give a daughter. We grinned at each other foolishly.

 

  
He wore a long tunic and leggings woven of indigo thread shot with peacock blue, iridescent in the light. His face had lost its gauntness, but he seemed older than I remembered him, an old man with a grizzled beard trimmed in two neat points.

 

  
Nasthai approached him bowing and bobbing. Mazais had a sour look on her face, and I was secretly pleased I’d scandalized her by being so forward with a tharos.

 

  
Garrio and Nasthai exchanged a few words, and likewise some quittance
passed from hand to hand, and Garrio said in the High, “Bring your belongings.”

 

  
I slung the strap of the gather sack over my shoulder, and draped the tharais shawl over my arm. I was already wearing the rest of my belongings, the woolen shoe-stockings and the net cap. “Where are we going?”

 

  
Garrio took me by the elbow and said, “Back to the palace.” And I’m ashamed to say I didn’t once look behind me, or say farewell to Knotais and Kenoabantapas and the others.

 

  
“And then home?” I said, meaning Incus. It was a pleasure to speak and understand so easily after the daily struggle with Lambaneish.

 

  
“That spiteful old sow didn’t want to say what she’d done to you, sending you here. Gods, this place is foul. What a stench! How could you stand it?”

 

  
I shrugged. I was used to it. “Have you seen Catena? Is she well?”

 

  
“They aren’t about to let me into that hen coop,” Garrio said.

 

  
I looked sideways at him. Garrio was watching his feet to make sure he didn’t step in filth. The narrow streets of the tharais district were not clean. “What does Kind Corvus want of me?”

 

  
Garrio made a jest about calling the king Kind Corvus, which was no sort of answer. And he pinched my upper arm and told me I was filling out well.

 

  
Before I could enter the tharos district, I had to strip naked and scrub myself with sand in a trough fed by Nephron’s fountain. Garrio rinsed his feet and hands. The guard at the gate shouted at me when I forgot to drape the shawl over my head. In the palace district I walked in Garrio’s wake, as close as a shadow, up steep stairs and through alleys, between high plastered walls topped with spiny tiles, the blank backsides of palaces.

 

  
It pleased my vanity to suppose King Corvus had sent Garrio, at some expense of time and trouble, to seek me out. He offered me a way back over the mountains, and if the price was to dream a few dreams, it was cheap enough. Yet I would not forget he had forgotten me. My hands were damp and sweat trickled down the small of my back. I was aware of my own smell under the shawl, and afraid I carried with me the stench of urine and onions. I would be glad to be rid of the tharais taint.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 21
  

  
The Bathing Room
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
B
ack to the palace,” Garrio had said, and I thought he meant the court where the king resided. But he took me to the hindgate of Arthygater Katharos’s palace, which I recognized by the blossoming pear tree I saw above the green-tiled roof. I asked why he was returning me to the manufactory, and he said farewell, he’d see me soon. He patted my arm and told me my services hadn’t been forgotten. He gave me no time to quarrel with him. And besides, I thought I would see Catena again, and maybe find the bones. I truly thought the king had found a way to make me tharos again.

 

  
Garrio left me with the porter, who delivered me in turn to the stout and capable woman who ran Arthygater Katharos’s affairs: her factotum, Gnathin. I couldn’t tell if she realized that under the shawl I was the same person she had lately banished from the manufactory.

 

  
Gnathin let me understand that the arthygater had no use for another tharais servant, especially a strange-ignorant one. She’d taken me as a favor, but I shouldn’t expect favoritism. I must never speak to the arthygater—did I know the language of gesture? No?—shit on the gods, how was one supposed to work with such a filthy stupid object?

 

  
She spoke rapidly, but by now I understood Lambaneish well enough to follow. I understood also her expression of disgust and her jabbing gestures. She reminded me of Sire Pava’s steward, who’d aimed to teach me manners after the Dame died, and would strike me if he saw an insolent look on my face. At least here I was not obliged to smile as I groveled. I bowed my head, hunched my shoulders, and stooped, until I was no taller than the factotum.

 

  
She began my education with the same sort of flail Zostra had used, laying the cords across my buttocks. No, no, it was not correct. I must stand like a statue when spoken to, and hold my head upright as if I carried a water jar. If I didn’t understand a command, I must brush my tharais ear with my hand, my tharais hand. If my hands were holding something, I must tilt my head to the left. See? There was no sign to show a command
was understood, so I stood still. Behind the shawl I made a face at her and mouthed, “Koprophagais!”

 

  
Despite that Gnathin swore they had no use for me, a use was quickly found. She sent me to serve as the arthygater’s depilator, to remove the tharais hair of her body. Of course I would not serve the arthygater only, but all the noblewomen who visited her bathing room.

 

  
The bathmistress, Mermera, didn’t deign to speak to me. She was a large woman with a prominent bosom, and she preceded me to the arthygater’s living quarters at a pace so stately I had to shorten my stride. The arthygater’s court was, in form, much like the manufactory, a two-story building with arcades and rooms around a courtyard, but in every respect more grand and splendid. The walls were adorned with painted scenes, and the floors, ceilings, and columns of the arcades covered with bright mosaics.

 

  
The bathing room took up one floor of the southern end of the building, and its walls depicted a garden much like the one in the courtyard. Mermera opened a low door hidden in the painted scene and a bad smell came out. She prodded me with her flail. I stooped to enter the room and when I straightened up, I found the ceiling was but a finger length above my head. If I’d been taller I’d have struck it. Mermera shut the door and went away.

 

  
The room was a plastered box no more than two paces to a side. It had no furnishings but a clay brazier and a pisspot, and no light but what came through the cracks around the doors. A niche in the wall held grain baskets and clay dishes and pots; a net bag full of sprouting onions hung on a peg. The stink came from a woman lying curled up on soiled straw and rushes against one wall. Her clothing and bedstraw were stained by the squirts: runny clay-colored shit. I knelt beside her and asked her name. She cleared her throat and said, “This one is Meninx.”

 

  
I uncovered my head and told her my name, and that I was to serve as depilator. She hid her face behind a hand. I knew then I was to take Meninx’s place, since she was no longer useful.

 

  
I took her hand so I could see her face, which had been so harrowed and hollowed by sickness that it was hard to imagine how she might have looked when she was well. There was beauty still in her large gray eyes, which she hid under half-closed eyelids. She seemed ashamed, as the ill often are. I told her I was a greenwoman, and she submitted to my gaze and touch without a word.

 

  
No fever. Her skin was sallow and clammy, and her breath had a sulfurous taint. I’d never felt a hearthfire like hers, with flames twisted and entangled and knotted just below her ribs, rather than flowing throughout: she was divided, emaciated above this knot, and below swelling with dammed and befouled waters that threatened a chill inundation. Her belly
was taut as an oxhide wineskin and made gurgling sounds, and her thighs were soft and puffy.

 

  
“How long are you ill?”

 

  
Under her eyelids she gave me a furtive look. “This one was low for a long time, years, but this winter the tides came three months long, and this one bled all the time, and could no longer do the work.”

 

  
I asked what ailed her, and she said, “It offended a meneidon.”

 

  
“Which?”

 

  
“It doesn’t know.”

 

  
“Then how do you know you offend?”

 

  
“It is ill, ein?” she said, and closed her eyes, showing me she was too weary to speak anymore, especially with a person who asked such ignorant questions.

 

  
She had offended a meneidon, therefore she was ill; she was ill, therefore she must have offended a meneidon…The reason chased its own tail. I wished I had the bones and compass to help me understand her strange affliction. But I needed no divination to see that she needed to be bathed, and given clean bedding and garments, and bandages for her bedsores—so many things I could do, and I was impatient to do them. But I thought just then she was more in need of tenderness. I sat with her, smoothing matted hair away from her brow with my cool right hand. Thinking how she must have suffered, lying alone in this small stinking room.

 

  
Not all alone. A damp shawl hung from a peg; someone had done the washing she was too weak to do for herself.

 

  
In the bathing room I drew water from the large pool tiled with blue waves and golden fish. A bronze heron stood on one leg in the pool, ceaselessly poised over its gilded prey, and its beak was a waterspout. Meninx groaned as I undressed and bathed her. I gentled my hands and moved with great care. She had a terrible sore on her buttocks, as big across as my fist, and smaller sores on her left side, the side she lay upon. I asked why she lay on that side if it hurt, and she said it was worse any other way.

 

  
I wrapped her in my shawl and settled her on the cleanest straw I could find. Then I scrubbed her wrapper and hung it on the pegs to dry, and borrowed the damp shawl.

 
  

 

  
Our small room had three doors. The one to the bathing room was still ajar. Another led to a privy with a mosaic floor and a two-hole bench covered in blue and green tiles—and, I swear, tiles of gold as well. The walls were painted to look like a garden with espaliered fruit trees, showing the plum heavy with fruit even as the quince bloomed.

 

  
I lifted the latch on the last door and found a brick stairway at my feet,
leading down into darkness. I descended, my shoulders brushing the wall on either side. I was truly blind when I reached the bottom. Even my shadow sight failed, for not a single star cast shadows by which I could see. There is no darkness so dark as that under the earth. I climbed back up to the little room and lit a tallow lamp, and went down again.

 

  
A narrow tunnel stretched away to my left; to my right it turned a corner, just past a niche holding a pair of squat jars that no doubt received wastes from the arthygater’s privy above. The plaster on the walls was stained and crumbling, revealing stacked stones underneath, or the rough-hewn rock of the mountain itself. I heard gurgling from a fat clay pipe half hidden in the wall. Torch smoke had blackened the low ceiling. These must be the tunnels of the dung beetles, the stinking bowels of the palace that allowed the koprophagais to perform their duties without besmirching the eyes of the tharos. The earthen floor was rutted from the wheels of their barrows.

 

  
I chose to go left—east, I supposed, under the south wall of the palace. Outside I knew my directions without effort, no matter how many turns in the path, but inside and underground, I had to think about it. I walked quite a long way before I found other niches with rows of waste jars, and after that a wooden door. Someone had scratched a lewd picture of a winged prick in the plaster beside the door. I rattled the latch and found it locked, and went on.