Wildfire (63 page)

 

  
“She wants Lanx,” I said. “I suppose she wants the whole coast—safe harbors for her shipping, and all the other merchants will have to beg for her by-your-leave to trade in Incus. What did you promise the husband? Whatever it was, she wants more. No doubt she’s paying for an army to cross the mountains next summon—but are you certain she means for you to lead it?”

 

  
King Corvus turned to face me and leaned against the door. “Women’s gossip. I shall never scorn it again. My wife always said that in Lambanein the women do the work and the men are ornaments. I see now it wasn’t a jest.”

 
  

 

  
I do believe the taskmistress of the napkins was pleased when I gave her the gold coin, though she had a queer way of showing it. She struck me about the head with the flat of her hand, and demanded more. The blows were no worse than being battered by a pigeon’s wing, but they irked me, and I called her a greedy sow. She crowded me into a corner and said, “Give over the rest.”

 

  
“The rest of what?”

 

  
“There is more, ein? More coins. Do you want this one to tell Gnathin what you did with the king?” She fingered my wrapper and shawl, and I pushed her away.

 

  
“Wait. Just wait.” I plucked out the silver beadcoins from the knot I’d tied in my shawl, and put them in her hands.

 

  
She knew there were more coins to be had, because she’d seen the king give them to me—suddenly I was sure of it. In my webeye I envisioned her pressed against a wall, watching us through a peephole into the tharais room. We had spoken in the High, mostly in the High, so she wouldn’t know what we’d said—but that we’d spoken at all, and that I’d bared my face to him—this tale could be sold to someone.

 

  
The taskmistress could have taken the coins and sold my secret to a real thrush, without letting me guess she had peeped. But Hazard Chance was evenhanded with me. It was my bad luck the taskmistress was greedy, and my good luck she was none too clever.

 

  
Her eyes were like little chips of veined quartz embedded in the clay of her face, and I wanted to slap her hard and leave the imprint of my hand on her cheek. But I said, “A cow gives milk every day, ein? She’s worth more as cow than beef, especially a skinny cow like this.” I showed her my thin arms. “But you feed her, can’t starve her. Leave her a little something, ein? A couple of pewter beadcoins so she doesn’t starve.”

 

  
She didn’t see why she should. She didn’t see that an arrangement that profited us both was more likely to endure. She thought one of us had to have it all and the other nothing.

 
  

 

  
It was harder than I expected to be a good thrush. I had the advantage of going unnoticed where Arthygater Katharos conducted her business, but I had this disadvantage: I couldn’t trust my memory. I wasn’t sure which of the arthygather’s dealings would be of importance to King Corvus, and felt obliged to remember them all. To this end I made use of my fingers and, when those proved too few, my knuckles, wrists, elbows, and so forth. I wished I had a string of different kinds of beads such as Gnathin the factotum used to remember her mistress’s innumerable instructions. Instead, my grandmother thumb became attached as if by a cord to an embroidered tapestry that was overdue for presentation to the temple of Peranon; my left elbow was supposed to bring to mind a debt owed by a certain Ornis for some wool, and the two large guards Katharos told Gnathin to send round if the woman dithered about paying. My right ear was dedicated to the shipment of five bales of orange gauze to the house of Tricari in Malleus; if the intended purchaser had fallen in the war, the gauzes were to be redyed in the colors of Hazard or Delve.

 

  
I needed no thumbs or elbows to remember the gossip about King Corvus. Consort Ostrakan had told the arthygater—and she recounted it to others—that Arkhyios Corvus had taken a napkin to the retiring room, and he left first and she came out later, stumbling. “Bowlegged,” said one of the ever-present and ever-flattering limpets, and everyone laughed. The arthygater was pleased. She’d begun to think him lacking, and wonder if he’d been to blame for her sister’s long barren spell. Of course using a tharais waste receptacle was not coupling, but it allowed at least for the unobstructed flow of his seed; damming it up was so unhealthy—very bad for the liver, likely to bring on constipation and melancholia.

 

  
The bathmistress noticed that I wasn’t perfectly attentive to my tasks that
morning, and when the bathers had all gone she gave me a beating, saying she knew I was daydreaming over some koprophagais, and if I didn’t take care I’d end up a filthy koprophagais myself, living in the middens outside the city with a passel of koprophagais brats.

 

  
I hardly cared. What a wonderful possession a secret can be.

 
  

 

  
We scrubbed the bathing room and chased the last of the dirty water down the drain where the chastened Poton lurked. Lychnais took a nap and I took my leave. I was burdened by so much to remember, and had to write it down. Having no linen to write on, I used potsherds instead, which could be found in heaps around the kitchen gates of palaces ruled by less thrifty factotums than Gnathin. I collected shards from cheap unglazed pots of the sort used for shipping olives and fish paste, and carried them in my shawl through the door in the wall and down the stairs in the steep-walled canyon. The place was nameless, as far as I knew; I called it the Cleft of Katabaton.

 

  
I sat on the stairs above her shrine. Swags of bluebind hung from the cliff at my back, noisy with bickering birds and droning bees. In a spill of sunlight I laid out the potsherds, and one by one took them up and scratched a few words in godsigns. The act of inscribing was a prayer, one godsign after another, no matter how trivial the words I made with them. I gave thanks to Wildfire with a libation of blood from the crook of my arm, for the gift of reading and writing again.

 

  
By the fifth day of the festival of the Quickening of Peranon, I had a collection of these inscriptions, such as:

 

  
Lynx, King:
I’d forgotten to tell King Corvus of the rumor that arrived on the wings of a thrush from Incus, that the First of Lynx now commanded the army of Corymb. Surely that would interest him.

 

  
House Tricari, five:
five bales of gauze, dyed the orange of Lynx.

 

  
Outward Sea, four:
the arthygater and her friend Phleibin commiserating on the loss of cargoes on four ships vanished in the Outward Sea. “Pirates?” Phleibin said; “Intolerable,” said Katharos. “The arkhon must do something.”

 

  
Back, years:
a verse recited in the dining court after the noblewomen had left for the evening.

 

  

 

  
A strong man’s back will bend

 

  
beneath a weight of years.

 

  
Heavy the years of an arkhon!

 

  

 

  
The other guests were scandalized.

 

  
Husband, quarrel:
Plain to see, at the banquet on the fourth night of the Quickening, that Arthygater Katharos had quarreled with Consort
Ostrakan. They conversed and laughed, but she didn’t touch his knee, or look to him when she’d said something witty to see if he admired it; nor did he, stretching and leaning against the backrest, brush her shoulder or thigh as if by chance.

 

  
I’d found the arthygater’s feckless daughters-in-law most fruitful for a certain kind of gossip about King Corvus himself, and the regard—or lack of it—in which he was held by the Lambaneish nobles. It amused everyone that the king waited daily upon Arkhon Kyphos, and daily the arkhon refused a private audience by way of his factotum. The factotum would accept King Corvus’s bribes and make excuses: I fear it is an inauspicious day, the arkhon can see no one; the arkhon must meet with ambassadors (from one trifling kingdom or another); or, quite often, the arkhon is taking a purge, he is indisposed. Come back tomorrow and I’ll give you an appointment, the factotum would say.

 

  
Of course the arkhon kept everyone waiting, or his factotum did. Even his sons and grandsons, the other princes of the kingdom, the arkhyios, were rarely permitted to speak to the arkhon in private. People laughed at Corvus’s plight, but they were as quick to ridicule each other. The last one to have an audience with Arkhon Kyphos was the only one safe from mockery. The arkhon was the sun on which their harvests depended. When he smiled on one courtier, bounty. When he frowned at another, drought. He was more fickle than the real Sun, who smiles on us all.

 

  
Rumor had it that the arkhon refused to see King Corvus for fear he’d ask for the loan of an army. He had given the king sanctuary, and that was enough. If Arthygater Katharos and her sister supplied Corvus with troops, their father might well be grateful that they’d spared him the awkwardness of refusing any other aid.

 

  
But there was a simpler and more certain way to rid Arkhon Kyphos of this embarrassing son-in-law. No doubt the same notion had already occurred to one of his sons or daughters, or some less distinguished courtier who even now might be scheming to kill King Corvus.

 

  
I shied away from such reasoning, and the ugly conclusions to which it led. That was a failing, Mai would have said. She had little patience for innocence, and none for willful ignorance, and had chided me often for supposing that what our rulers did was beyond our reckoning, as if they were gods.

 

  
They were not gods; they were mortals. Strange to think King Corvus might fight his way through the harsh Ferinus only to be strangled by a silken cord of malice in the court of Arkhon Kyphos. Once I’d dreamed of the king returning to a friend’s keep when his friend wasn’t there, and the hounds that once had fawned on the king attacked him. In the mountains
I’d kept the dream from King Corvus and given it instead to the jack Voro to pass on to his master. The warning had been misdelivered.

 

  
But the king didn’t need me to warn him of treachery or assassination plots. He had grown up in a court, probably no better or worse than this one. He would not have dawdled, as I had, on the way to concluding someone might try to kill him. His mother would try, for one, if she could reach so far. The fruitful question was, who else?

 

  
These rumors, suppositions, verses, questions—gathered diligently by day in the bathing room, and by night in the dining court, so I went sleepless save for a catnap in the afternoon—what could be made of them? If I took these broken pieces to the king, I was more likely to be paid in mockery than gold. And yet it was not my place to know which shard was valuable and which was rubbish. Maybe King Corvus would be able to arrange them into a useful pattern.

 
  

 

  
Tonight was the fifth and final night of the Quickening, and Arkhon Kyphos was giving a banquet for the notables of the kingdom. The arthygater and her household were to attend, of course, with the necessary retinue of servants. Lychnais was required in case a wisp of the arthygater’s hair strayed from its place in the wickerwork tower upon her head, but my services weren’t needed.

 

  
I had somewhere else to go, and something I was afraid to do. Since I saw the dowser’s hazel rod come alive in her hands, it had been in my mind to dowse for my stolen bones in the manufactory. The dowser wouldn’t help, so I must try it myself. I borrowed what I needed from the bathing room—knife, pot with embers, mortar and pestle, a jar of lard—and returned to the Cleft of Katabaton in search of something to sell to the weavers.

 

  
There were stout white lilies growing wild on the floor of the cleft, like those in the arthygater’s garden, with a heavy scent. I collected their long stamens. In the Dame’s garden I’d often stained my clothing with their powder, which looked brown but smeared saffron yellow, and Na had used to scold me for it. This powder proved better than swallowwort sap to color my forearms in the tharos manner. The color was perfect, and it didn’t fade when it was wet.

 

  
I harvested petals of lilies past their peak, faintly tinged with brown, and mashed them with lard to make an ointment to supple the skin and cure blotches. I found water lilies in the still water of a pond abandoned by the river when it changed course, and added their blooms to the ointment, for they were useful against freckles. The petals were fleshy and soft to the touch, with a waxy sheen, and even as I crushed this beauty between pestle and mortar, they offered up their fragrance.

 

  
I made a small fire before Katabaton’s altar and seethed the water lily roots in water. Mai had taught me this—she sold this decoction to quiet lust. Usually a customer planned to give it to some man or other, but sometimes a woman wanted it for herself, when Desire had pestered her too long. Some of the women in the manufactory might be grateful for such a way to ease their minds.

 

  
Time passed in which I didn’t think of anything but these simple and soothing tasks. The Sun went down. Indigo darkness came quickly in that deep gorge, but the river shone silver under the Moon. The Quickening always falls on a full Moon, Nephelais had told me. I wished it otherwise, for Crux Moon is strongest when full; he might trifle with me by spoiling the aim of the dowsing rod. But I might not get a better chance.

 

  
I made my way along the narrow verge between the cliff and the river, from boulders to sandbanks to mudflats, until I found a forked alder sucker, new growth sprouting from the rootstock of an old giant, and cut it down. I peeled the rod and the wood was bone white.

 

  
I knelt before the painting of Katabaton and laid down the rod, and also the gift I’d made for her, a crown woven of perfect lily blossoms. I drizzled a mixture of mother’s milk and orange swallowwort juice into my right eye until it stung. The Dame told me in a dream it would help me see small and far, and at last I understood what she meant. It would not cure my webeye; I was doomed to go blind in that eye, but the swallowwort might help me see visions caught in the web. With the burnt tip of a stick, I blackened my upper lids with charcoal, as Az had done when she read the bones for me.