Wildfire (58 page)

tharos servant hissed in outrage, “Not here!” Sire Vafra stood and took me by the wrist and pulled me after him. He was too drunk to see the door hidden in the painted scene of dancers. I lifted the onion-shaped latch and we went into the tharais room.

 

  
He dropped my wrist and showed me the coins in his palm. Two pewters; even a two-copper whore was worth more than that. He was drunk, unsteady, and I thought I could push him over with one hand if I had to. I shook my head and he took out two more beadcoins, and when I refused again he put his hand on my belly and shoved me against the wall. He leaned on me and put his mouth on mine. Even through the shawl I tasted doublewine, mixed with aniseeds he’d chewed between courses. He reached for his laces with both hands and I gave him a push. He staggered, and I clawed the cloth from my mouth and pulled off my shawl and glared.

 

  
I said in the High, “If you offer so little, you’ll pay it little mind when I refuse, eh?”

 

  
I was too furious to find the look on his face comical, or the looks, rather, as one chased another at a pace hampered by drink: outrage at the insolence of my refusal—puzzlement that I spoke a language he understood—recognition. He stepped back and began to laugh. As he was no longer pressing me against the wall, I put two paces between us, the whole width of the room.

 

  
“The king’s dreamer!” Sire Vafra said. “So you’re a whore now? What’s your price then? Let me see what I have.” He squatted down, brushed away straw, and emptied his purse on the floor. He had coins and beads of various sorts and sizes, a bronze amulet, pieces of string, and several walnuts. He swayed and sat down, saying, “Oof!” and laughing some more. He looked like a silly boy, snickering to himself. He held up two walnuts. “What do you say?”

 

  
“You are filthy as the sole in this one’s foot,” I said in Lambaneish. In the High I added, “I doubt you can stand upright, you or your prickle.”

 

  
“Then I’ll lie down,” he said, and did so, sprawling on his back. “Come over here, and you can have it all, the whole purse.”

 

  
I walked up to him and put my left foot, clad in the woolen shoe-stocking, on his belly. He didn’t seem to know or care it was an insult to be trod on. He reached for my leg and I stepped away, and said, “Tell your king I’ve been dreaming about him. Can you remember that?” I stooped to pick up his copper coins. As an afterthought, I took a long carnelian bead. “I’ll go hire a planking, a palanquin to carry you home.”

 

  
“Don’t go.”

 

  
I smiled and pulled the shawl over my head. I kept his coins and didn’t
trouble to seek litter bearers. Someone would soon find him asleep in the straw, and see him home with or without his purse.

 

  
Day was dawning when I gave the copper beadcoins to Nephelais’s taskmistress and told her I would like to serve again.

 

  
“This one thinks a use can be found for you, ein?” she said. I saw from the way she looked at me that it had been too large a bribe.

 

  
“It wants to serve Arkhyios Corvus,” I said.

 

  
“He is not often a guest.”

 

  
“When he is, ein?”

 

  
She laughed. “Got the eyes on the Crow, have you? Good luck. This one heard his taproot got frostbite and turned black and fell off.”

 

  
“This one hears it didn’t,” I said.

 
  

 

  
I hurried back with two soiled tharos cloths bundled in my shawl. Lychnais was busy with the morning preparations. She said, “Meninx fretted. If you have a man, why didn’t you say so? So as not to cause worry, ein?”

 

  
I crouched by Meninx without answering. I was troubled by the watery sound of her breath, and the way her mouth was pinched in pain as she slept. Her eyelids were satiny and delicate: white petals, not apple blossom but iris, threaded with blue veins.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 23
  

  
The Dowser
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
W
he cloths Nephelais had lent me were mismatched and soiled with vomit. The shawl, dyed with weld, was from a tharos servingwoman, and the silk wrapper belonged to a guest and was of the bright orange-yellow color from expensive saffron dye. I washed them in the tunnel below our room, and spread them in a patch of sunlight in a quiet alley, and when they were still damp I put them on. I covered my hair with the servant’s shawl; I didn’t have the beadcoins a woman in such a fine wrapper should display on her net cap.

 

  
I came blinking out of a narrow alley into a wide avenue lined with the high walls of palaces, and in the middle of this avenue, a glittering canal between two rows of tall slender palm trees. I retreated into the shade of the alley, overawed. Not only by the splendor of the watercourse as it descended the terraces, with its jets and chutes and statues, but by the guards peering down from towers over the grand foregates of the palaces, and the pavement crowded with litters carried by barebacked trotting men, laden donkeys, riders, and servants on foot.

 

  
I ventured into the street again and was at once part of the bustle, another hurrying figure. I tried to walk as gracefully as if I bore a water jar on my head, but fear made me awkward. Something about me—my gait or clothing or smell—surely something would give me away as tharais. And my face was so naked without the shawl. I could be seen.

 

  
The avenue led straight down to the tharos gate into the lower city—not the tharais district, where the dyehouse was, but the part reserved for ordinary tharos folk. I nodded at the guards and went through. It proved quite easy to leave the palace precincts.

 

  
I was in search of the cloth market, but I dawdled, unwilling to ask a stranger where it could be found. I turned off the canal avenue into narrow streets, following my feet, or perhaps my nose; I found myself in the crowded fragrance market, a narrow street of narrow buildings, each with a counter under a raised shutter. At one counter a little boy ground nuts that released
an intoxicating smell. A gray cat jumped up on the counter, and when the boy stopped to nuzzle it, a woman scolded him from inside the shop.

 

  
I bought one nut with a pewter coin, to sweeten up the boy’s mother, and walked on smiling, even with my face bared for all to see. I need not have worried that I’d be found out. I knew better than to look a man in the eye, but I looked at the women, and they at me as we passed one another, and no harm in it, just ordinary curiosity. So many kinds of people, so many faces, each bearing signs of the life lived. All unknown to me, as I was unknown to them.

 

  
I tried to fathom it, how all these folk lived in one city in one kingdom of the wide world. And how each of us in this multitude carried within us another multitude, our ancestors and descendants throughout the ages. And all of us mortal, even kings and cities and kingdoms, and all of us in time forgotten by the living. Some days that would have been a sad thought. Today I was unreasonably exalted by it.

 

  
I wandered on until I came to the cloth market, not a single street but a warren of them. I stayed away from the merchants in fine buildings and visited a square where women sat on the ground under awnings, with their cloths neatly folded before them. In Lambanein, cloth was woman’s business, and I knew from eavesdropping what a bale of fine gauzes would fetch in Malleus, but Arthygater Katharos didn’t trifle with small transactions; I was unsure what I could buy with the carnelian bead I’d stolen from Sire Vafra. I showed it to one clothier after another, and bargained with a seller of used clothing, who took the bead and all my coins in exchange for a linen shawl and wrapper that had been overdyed with weld after the saffron had faded.

 

  
I washed my hands and feet at the gate before entering the palace district. In the dusk I changed my clothes in an alley and became tharais again. The only witness was a scrawny brown dog that trotted past me with his head low and tail high. When I got back to our room, I realized I’d forgotten to put on the yellow powder that tharos women wore on their arms. Lucky no one had noticed.

 
  

 

  
The next afternoon I used the last of the swallowwort and milk thistle root to make the infusion for Meninx. She had taken it four days in succession, and there had been encouraging signs, especially an end to the vomiting. But these small gains could easily be lost. With my warm left hand, I stroked Meninx’s thin arms and back, and her swollen legs and belly, trying—as I did every day—to unravel the flames of her hearthfire so they could flow freely throughout her body. Wishing I were deft enough to undo whatever had been done to her.

 

  
She said, “Last autumn, when this one was so sick, it gave jasmine gar
lands to the meneidon in the bathing pool. Where else has it been, ein? Who else could it have offended?”

 

  
Lychnais looked up from her bowl of barley cooked with beans and onions. “Maybe one of them took a fancy to you, wants a wife.”

 

  
I’d heard the tales of meneidon inflicting lovesickness, but I thought it unkind of Lychnais to mention it. I grimaced at her over Meninx’s head. She shrugged and scraped the wooden bowl with her spoon.

 

  
Meninx said, “This one wishes…” I leaned closer to hear her. “It wishes a dowser could come. It has coins saved—take them, take them all.”

 

  
Lychnais shook her head. We both knew Meninx had no money, all her beadcoins spent long ago on necessities.

 

  
I wiped tears from Meninx’s face with a damp rag, and she turned her head toward the wall.

 

  
In Lambanein the dead walked the river road to the overworld, tharos stepping lightly on the river’s skin, tharais trudging underwater—for even in death the tharais way was harder. But the shades of people who died due to offending meneidon remained, aimless and desolate, in the vicinity of the living. Some took up residence in a cistern or waste receptacle and became meneidon themselves, easy to vex and quick to hex. Meninx dreaded this fate. Unless she could find out which meneidon she had riled, she could neither live nor die in peace. My dreams and herbs and all the warmth in my left hand couldn’t cure her of this.

 

  
Meninx slept, and I asked Lychnais how much it cost to fetch a dowser, and if we could afford one. Where I came from, healers didn’t work for coins, though of course they were glad to accept gifts.

 

  
“How much money do you have?” she said. “The coin is not just for the dowser. There is the feast, the sacrifice.”

 

  
I confessed I had no money.

 

  
“This one saw coins on your cap yesterday. Where did they go?” I didn’t choose to answer, and she said sharply, “So you are asking if this one can afford a dowser, ein? Since you spent your money.”

 

  
Lychnais had beadcoins on her cap, and I knew how she came by them: she took it as her privilege to steal from the bathing room, selling or bartering honey, wax, henna, unguents, and such, in quantities Mermera wouldn’t miss. “This one pays you back,” I said.

 
  

 

  
I set out in my tharais clothing, and this time I found my way easily to the gate of the tharais district, and from the gate to the river, avoiding the street of dyers. I collected swallowwort and milk thistle for Meninx, greens for cooking, fibers for making net bags, and other herbs I came upon. My gather sack was nearly full when I saw drifts of sweetrush growing in the
marshes, still young, knee high. I gave a prayer of thanks to Growan, for the sweetrush root belonged to the Crone, the shoot and leaves to the Maid, and the fat spathe and yellow flower to Wortweal, and all parts of it were useful.

 

  
I hitched up my wrapper and waded into the muck. The long roots grew sideways in tangled floating mats, and I used the bathing-room knife to harvest a section about as big around as my embrace. Men were out on the river in shallow drafted boats, cutting the rushes with billhooks; they shouted “Hoy” at me, but didn’t interfere. I cleaned the roots of mud, and bundled the rushes with twists of bluebind to carry on my back.

 

  
I remembered gathering the rushes in our village, when in spring the river flooded the low meadow. In my webeye I saw Cook sorting rushes on the shore, looking for the tender centers of the sheaves to serve at dinner; and there was Na, laughing at the ducks waggling their tails in the air as they dove. All of us singing in the Low:
The rushes do grow green, all agreen-oh.

 
  

 

  
I spread the outer leaves of the rushes on the floor of our room, for the smell, so pleasant to us, was loathsome to fleas. I bathed Meninx. Once I could have fit my palm into the sore on her buttocks, and now it was shallow and pink.

 

  
I scraped and sliced the sweetrush roots, and boiled them in four changes of water to take away some of their bitterness and pungency. The third water I used to make thin barley gruel for Meninx. She had no appetite, but she exerted herself to oblige me. Even this small effort made her weary. I settled her down on the fresh rushes, and she seemed to sleep.

 

  
With stolen honey I made syrup for the fourth boiling of the roots, and I stirred while they simmered. Lychnais was off on some errand, and it was quiet in the room until Meninx moaned. I saw she had been crying, and asked what troubled her.

 

  
“Nothing, nothing,” she said. “This one is just remembering the bird, the day Father took this one to market, and its speedeedee in a cage, and sold these both. So long ago. It’s not important.”

 

  
“Why does the father sell you?”

 

  
“It was this one’s own fault, ein? It took up the spindle in the left hand always, and couldn’t be taught to do otherwise. It was only little, so little. He was ashamed to have a tharais daughter, and he said it wasn’t his. He hit the mother. She said she needed peace in the household, and there’d be none so long as it lived with them.” She wept even now at the disgrace of it.