Jay Lake - Green

Still without words, Mistress Tirelle forced me on through.

The last room on the ground level was windowless just as the dining room had been. These walls were padded with a much coarser cloth. The floors were covered with tight-woven straw. No furniture was present except for a low wooden bench that seemed to have been abandoned on a whim. It did not fit the sense of purpose that coiled invisible but strong in the rest of this place.

“Outside, Girl,” Mistress Tirelle growled. I marched a quick step ahead of her fist, until she caught me across my still-bare shoulders. “Do not walk so-it is undignified.”

I bit back a reply. We were on the porch now, in the deep shadows beneath the columned ceiling that was the balcony above.

Mistress Tirelle turned me to face her with a bruising grip on my shoulder. “You will never be in these rooms I have shown you except as part of a lesson. Some Mistress will be with you at all times down the stairs. Do not descend to practice, or seek a lost scarf, or any other excuse which ever enters your foolish head.” She pointed to the end of the porch just outside the empty room. “We go up now. That is where you will sleep, and bathe, and take meals unless you have been brought down here.”

I stared at her, round-eyed and silent.

“You have leave to ask a question, Girl.”

“No, thank you,” I said. Not a question, and so I had pushed past the letter of her word.

She did not strike me for that. So there are limits to her limits . I made careful note of this discovery on the secret list that was already forming deep within me.

Upstairs the rooms were far plainer, though still pleasant and well-appointed beyond anything I might ever have imagined back in Papa’s hut. Neither Federo’s room at the wayhouse nor our cabin on Fortune’s Flight had approached this simple comfort and well-wrought craft.

The deep porch formed a wide balcony, with a few chairs and a table of woven cane and whip-thin wood. All these second-storey rooms opened outward rather than connecting within as below.

A smaller kitchen above the great one would still have served to feed our entire village at home. Walls and floor alike were tiled with ceramic squares painted in the pattern of a lion devouring a snake, which in turn devoured the next lion beyond, and so forth.

The eating room was dominated by a large but simple table polished smooth as the mirrored gloss of the great table downstairs. Instead of the unnaturally detailed silk, these walls were wood that had been washed over with a pale color.

Beside that was a sitting room with a few wooden chairs and small tables, and a smaller hearth than the receiving room downstairs. The two rooms past were sleeping rooms, the one for Mistress Tirelle next to the stairs. I had no doubt she slept with the ears of a bat.

The high-walled courtyard, the baths in a cellar below the great kitchen, a double handful of rooms, and the struggling pomegranate tree were the entirety of my world for a very long time to come. All of it ruled by Mistress Tirelle.

I was clad in simple shifts much the same as what Federo had given me during our travels. There were three of them, and it was my responsibility to keep them exceptionally clean. A speck of dust on the hem, a spot of food on the front, and my ears were boxed or my head slapped.

At the first, we lived only upstairs. Mistress Tirelle was taking my measure in subtler ways than her ungentle prodding in the courtyard that first day. She had me cook, or at least try to. After my grandmother died, Papa had always prepared our rice mush for dinner. Besides which, I been too young to tend the fire.

She had me sew, and was surprised at my skill. The bells that had been between my fingers since before I could remember had taught their lessons well. I did not explain. Mistress Tirelle did not ask.

The duck woman also made a cursory review of the arts of the mind which Federo had begun to teach me, testing my comprehension of letters and simple arithmetic. I was careful not to show more wit than the questions were intended to discover.

Though she carped and grumbled at every little thing, and was quick with a hard hand, I took quiet satisfaction in seeing how little Mistress Tirelle had to complain about. Other than my attitude, of course, which she tried alternately to beat out of me or lecture to death.

I never did bow my head quite deeply enough, or answer quickly enough, or remain quiet enough for her. Mistress Tirelle had spent her life with candidates. She knew how to read the set of a girl’s back. Bidden to silence, in those early days my only weapon was complete obedience combined with a sullen insolence. We both knew it well, and hated each other for it.

So began the years of my education.

“First we shall learn to boil,” she told me one day. I had been there less than two weeks and was already keeping a secret tally against the day I found a way to reclaim my silk and bells.

I nodded. There had been no question addressed to me, no permission granted to speak.

“All life came from water,” Mistress Tirelle continued. “Water lies within us all. You spit water from your mouth and pass water from your vagina. So first we cook with water, to honor who we are and make our food separate from the browsing of beasts.” She gave me a shrewd look. “Do you understand?”

I did. Papa had boiled rice after all, though I couldn’t recall having the word boil before beginning to learn Petraean. “Yes, Mistress Tirelle.”

“What is it that we do to boil water?”

“We make a fire beneath a pot, ma’am.” I hastily added, “A pot filled with water.”

“Hmm.”

She wanted some deeper answer, but what I had said was true enough. After a moment, Mistress Tirelle went on: “Later we will discuss the size and shape of vessels, and why you boil some things thus and others so.”

I nodded again. Cooking seemed a strange place to begin whatever journey Federo had set me on, but here we cooked.

She built a fire in a little metal stove. After it was burning well, she drew a knife from within her black wrappings and proceeded to slice a bundle of dark green leaves shot through with pale gray veins. They smelled sharply of a strange yellowy scent on the edge of unpleasantness. “We cut these spinach leaves in order for them to cook evenly.” Something close to a smile quirked across Mistress Tirelle’s face. “Not all is ritual, Girl. Some purposes are as simple as everyday hunger.”

I forgot myself and answered her. “Hunger isn’t simple, ma’am.”

When she struck me with the knife handle, it left a mark on my forehead that was many days in fading.

“Obedience is simple,” the duck woman said, standing over me as I crouched on the floor, swallowing my sobs. “It is also the greatest everyday virtue any woman can possess. Most of all you.”

We cooked. We washed. We swept. We sewed. For a long time, there was no one but me and Mistress Tirelle. Food was brought to the gate and accepted there by her from persons unseen. I then carried it to the upstairs kitchen under her supervision. The slops and night jars went down a drain on the far side of the court, adjacent to the high blank wall of whatever central building lay beyond.

I came to realize there were more courts besides mine. If I stood at the deepest part of the porch, I could see two other treetops. Occasionally a voice would be raised, then break off. I knew there must have been an array of guards and servants elsewhere in this place, but Federo had spoken truly when he told me I was leaving the world to be here. I knew only the company of women, and of women only Mistress Tirelle.

The sun moved, too, growing a bit more southerly in its track across the patch of sky that had been given me. At home, if I climbed a tree, I could see for furlongs on furlongs, across rice paddies to the village and far beyond. Here, there was only a bit of the heavens, cold stone, and air that never tasted right.